The process of Vertical Integration at Intermountain Healthcare
Intermountain Healthcare owns a number of clinics, hospitals and hospices. More importantly, each hospital and clinic provides various services and products (Intermountain Healthcare, 2010). The value chain of the company is divided into several branch including services healthcare services provided by hospitals and clinics, products and researches.
Vertical Integration Intermountain Healthcare: How Does It Work?
- Do you need a hospital:
- In case patients are in need of a particular doctor, it is necessary to fill in the form where a patient provides his specific requirements, such as type of a hospital at the company’s disposal, language, gender, address, preferences;
- the request will be processed with via vertical integration to find the most appropriate variant.
- Do you need online prescription bill?
- Fill in the blank and follow the link;
- The process will be processed and returned to a patient
- Do you nee to find a hospital?
- The name of facility, the type of facility, address;
- This data will be used to searcher for the most appropriate variant.
Each inquiry is carried through vertical integration. This can create some critical problems. In particular, the company should deliver services through a chain of accomplished values in accordance with fixed priorities. For instance, if a patient is looking for a hospital, the company first makes an inquiry about location of the hospital. Once the hospital is found, it seeks for the ones that correspond to patients’ requirement. Then, the company ask hospital whether these services are available. In its turn hospital makes an analysis of patients’ information and provides possible variants. In the chart presented above, the second area is colored in orange, which means that this is the most critical area of vertical integration.
Evaluating the Vertical Integrated Process at Intermountain Healthcare
In-depth examination of the vertical process taken place at Intermountain is considered to be a model of vertical integration. The process is more typical of backward vertical integration process because all the inquiries and management are carried out to receive the appropriate input (Tomlinson, 1990). In addition, as vertical integration is also closely associated with division of labor, the company fit well in the frameworks (Preker and World Bank, 2007, p. 90).
