Introduction
The application of organizational theory comprises such approaches to organizational analysis as a network organization, the economy of information and knowledge, and organizational age. As such, the concept of the organizational framework can be defined as collective units comprising of people who are under the supervision of another entity with the aim of pursuing collective objectives, needs, and requirements and adapting to the ever-changing organizational dynamic (Fjeldstad and Snow, 2018). In the theory, certain models assume the fractional disbandment of a corporation and the complete replacement of the pyramid by the market mechanism (Fifield et al., 2018). One such organizational concept is the modular hospital, as discussed in the current study.
The dynamic of the contemporary modular hospital consists of the ever-growing technological advancement, the increase in clinical knowledge, and the improved differentiation in demand for quality healthcare services that need their overall patient outcomes. For instance, because of the development of medicine, there is a great increase in the competitive intensity in the healthcare market, marked by the great changes in the attitude of patients (Barlow, 2016). In this case, the promotion of consumerism in health-related practices has led to patients changing from being passive persons to active members in their own care protocols; hence increased differentiation is in demand. In this regard, it is valid to argue that the overall situations of the current healthcare settings should inspire the application of modular hospitals. Therefore, the current literature explores and analyses how the modular hospital can be implemented by describing the concepts of modularization and its benefits in capturing and delivering value through technological transformation.
How Sweden Healthcare System Capture and Deliver Value
In Sweden’s healthcare system, there are various debates that service delivery, accessibility, and receptiveness have not been well developed with regards to elevated costs of care. Because of this, the country adopted the national care guarantee action to reduce the waiting time period for patients. The policy was summarized by the slogan “0-7-90-90” representing the waiting days for a patient to receive care (0), consultation with a healthcare provider (7), an expert in the healthcare domain (90), and the last care process of treatment (90) (Ljungvall and Janlöv, 2019). To increase care productivity with minimal cost to the patients, Sweden adopted the internal market experiment (Avby, Kjellström, and Bäck, 2019). The learning from this adoption and any other healthcare assets reforms, for example, the process of assimilating providers; in some countries is that the existing, long-standing organizational institutions and new methods of structuring hospitals to reduce waiting time matter. With this strategy emerged several problems such as inadequate accessible information on the quality of the various treatment options (Sun et al., 2020). However, Sweden has not fully implemented the internal market stimulants for healthcare productivity.
Theory Framework
Modularization is a well-known concept as it is defined as a set of guidelines for handling multifaceted systems. The principal objective of the theory is to disintegrate the systems into discrete subunits known as modules, which can co-interact with each other through uniform interfaces to create value addition. In essence, the modules comprise fewer elements compared to the larger system before a breakdown, thus allowing the smaller units to sturdily interact with stronger elements and ignore the weaker elements (Sun et al., 2020). In this regard, a complete system can be perceived as either greater or weaker in terms of the degree of modulation.
In the case of hospital modularization, the concept is used to disintegrate the old forms of hierarchical governance into structures of the lower healthcare complexities. In other words, hospital modularization, according to Silander et al. (2017), results from a robust process-modification which leads to the complete service delivery measures, thus, are managed autonomously by multifunctional units within the hospital subunits. Hospital modular results from robust process-modification- the complete service delivery procedures which are managed autonomously by multifunctional units within the hospital subunits (Silander et al., 2017). The figure below describes a simple hospital modularization for structure re-engineering in a hospital setting.
Characteristic of the Modular Hospital
The central role of a modular hospital is the delivery of service to its customers, which in this case are the patients. As such, the modularization of a hospital should be based on the critical concept of service delivery and process in the hospital setting, including such actions as patient’s treatments and disease management. Precisely, the process of treatment of a patient and the management of illness represents the primary process of a modular hospital and should be disintegrated into such routes as reception, disease analysis, treatment, and patient discharge. The design (see Figure 2) is a view of a digitized hospital modular form. In this case, the added method to this principle process is the support developments of the digital appliances. As such administrative area, which does not necessarily underwrite directly to the well-being of a patient, is equivalent to the medical treatment process.
In the diagram above, the implementation of substitutes is possible, which are constant with the current modularization. In this case, the modularization is based on the prototypical departmental disintegration of units as seen in most hospital, thus is highly dependable for hospital modular implementation. Arguably, hospitals are systematized internally within such clinical subdivisions as internal medicine, surgery, radiology, and laboratory units, among others, but require other functional units such as e-medicine, e-pharmacy, and e-prescription to support the sub-elements. In this case, the clinical department is portrayed as a larger unit than the rest because it often encounters many physicians, nurses, hospital amenities, correlated rooms, and other such facilities as monitoring rooms, restrooms, and patient education and counseling.
In the diagram (see Figure 2), the clinical departments are predominantly function-oriented, and their coordination is carried out by the executive hierarchy of governance. In this sense, a traditional hospital faces such problems as the disintegration of clinical departments. Therefore, with a modular hospital as indicated above (see Figure 2), units are sub-sectioned into smaller subunits to intensify the process of positioning and the introduction of internal market segments and instruments such as supply chain management. Therefore, as illustrated in Figure 2, the resulting modular business design provides value proposition and value capture and delivery transformation.
Recommendation and Evaluation of Modular Hospital Design
The Value Proposition and Transformation
Based on the above design and its subsequent implementation for emerging organizations, the adoption of value proposition is significantly different from those of traditional organizations. For instance, based on the thorough analysis of literature concerning the capture and delivery of value from the modular hospital, research by Fischer et al. (2019) established that there is an existence of a shift from reactive health care delivery to a proactive modular hospital. As such, a modular hospital with digital transformation is formulated in such a way that it improves and fosters an individual’s health. In this case, it fosters to making its patients healthier, thus preventing one from getting sick, rather than making people be healthy after getting ill. With the presence of administration governance, value proposition transforms a person from the state acute perception of healthcare delivery, thus transformation healthcare that focuses on disease prevention through acknowledging self-care, protective telemedicine, and illness prediction.
Moreover, modular hospitals should focus on providing users with simple devices comprising such healthcare manuals as nutrition guides and fitness guidebooks which help in tracking health-related activities and offer healthcare providers recommendations. In this case, hospital firms leveraging preventive telemedicine connect the physicians or nurses with patients and their families (Wernhart, Gahbauer, and Haluza, 2019). According to Abouelmehdi, Beni-Hessane, and Khaloufi (2018), the supply chain and management in the market segment of intelligent diagnostic provide health care workers with Artificial Intelligent (AI)-based approaches to detect illness early before emergence. In this regard, the market segment, with the help of new technologies, has provided modular hospitals with the capacity to collect data and digitally capture information through cloud computing for quality healthcare purposes.
Value Capture and Delivery Transformation
Although the new modulation of care systems triggers additional effectiveness of the design using market segments and lowers the cost of healthcare, challenges are prone to happen. For instance, Fischer et al. (2019) established that with more modulation of hospital departments, there is an increased number of actors to coordinate with one another, thus requiring more overheads. Therefore, though the care staff promotes efficiency in care capture because of modulation, there is the chance of cost increment. According to Fischer et al. (2019), a modular hospital increases the cost of care because the healthcare providers are within the current value chain. As a result, the new market segments lessen the standard duties accessible to them, hence delivering quality. Arguably, the cost of synchronizing services in this approach will rise, though initially, and the total cost of care delivered to patients will reduce, subsequently improving the quality of healthcare.
Despite Fitsense being a viable case study for this design, the current proposal (see Figure 2) increases the transformation of value capture and delivery. The design is based on a healthcare manufacturing industry because of the propagation of actual files and the availability of inclusive patient outlines. For instance, Fitsense uses customer records captured by cloud computing technologies to help indemnities and insurance companies to deliver the precise form of security at cost-friendly prices (Massie et al., 2018). Moreover, the PatientsLikeMe, a social networking platform, delivers patients a stage to bond with others who might be suffering from the same diseases, monitoring and sharing personal experiences with the aim of promoting quality healthcare outcomes (Wicks et al., 2018). With regards to the social networking policy for healthcare experts, it allows doctors and physicians to post and remark on medical descriptions.
Conclusion
The outcome of the above illustrations demonstrates that acute perception of healthcare capture and deliver transformation is dependent on the interconnected, network-based value capture and delivery. If it is incorporated into the healthcare industry as a result of the new market segments with new characters, it leads to the leveraging of the platform-based business models. From the analysis, most segments adopted such exchange-based platforms as telemedicine, doctor alerts, self-care, and health system e-commerce. The use of telemedicine by the healthcare providers in the modular design discussed necessitates the interconnection between physicians and patients. Conversely, doctor’s alerts and AI-based approaches can facilitate the online examining, studying, detection, and making of contacts, just like in the PatientsLikeMe, hence capturing and delivering value as described in Figure 2 above.
Reference List
Avby, G., Kjellström, S. and Bäck, M. A. (2019) ‘Tending to innovate in Swedish primary health care: A qualitative study’, BMC Health Services Research, 19(1), pp. 1-10.
Abouelmehdi, K., Beni-Hessane, A. and Khaloufi, H. (2018) ‘Big healthcare data: Preserving security and privacy’, Journal of Big Data, 5(1), pp. 1-18.
Barlow, J. (2016) Managing innovation in healthcare. London: World Scientific Publishing Company.
Fifield, L. J. et al. (2018) ‘Hospital wards and modular construction: Summertime overheating and energy efficiency’, Building and Environment, 141(1), pp. 28-44.
Fischer, G. S. et al. (2019) ‘Towards evaluating proactive and reactive approaches on reorganizing human resources in IoT-based smart hospitals’, Sensors, 19(17), 3800.
Fjeldstad, Ø. D. and Snow, C. C. (2018) ‘Business models and organization design’, Long Range Planning, 51(1), pp. 32-39.
Ljungvall, Å. and Janlöv, N. (2019) Health Systems in Transition (HiT) Profile of Sweden. Web.
Massie, S. et al. (2018) ‘Fitsense: Employing multi-modal sensors in smart homes to predict falls’, In International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (pp. 249-263). Springer, Cham.
Silander, K. et al. (2017) ‘Modularizing specialized hospital services: Constraining characteristics, enabling activities and outcomes’, International Journal of Operations & Production Management., 37(6), pp. 791-818.
Sun, Y. et al. (2020) ‘Constraints hindering the development of high-rise modular buildings’, Applied Sciences, 10(20), pp. 1-20.
Wernhart, A., Gahbauer, S. and Haluza, D. (2019) ‘EHealth and telemedicine: Practices and beliefs among healthcare professionals and medical students at a medical university’, PLoS One, 14(2), pp. 1-13.
Wicks, P. et al. (2018) ‘Scaling PatientsLikeMe via a “generalized platform” for members with chronic illness: Web-based survey study of benefits arising’, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 20(5), pp. 1-15.