ITECH1005-5005: Federation University -Business Information Systems - Report Writing Assignment

Internal Code:MAS75

Report Writing Assignment:

Introduction: BestHealth Hospital specialises in providing a range of orthopaedic surgical services for both private and public patients from regional Victoria. The hospital currently has contracts with a number of surgeons and anaesthetists (who are essentially private professional contractors) using two surgical theatres that are available for use, on average, 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and only these basic operational hours are used by the government to assess the total available surgical time for calculating minimum time to be made for public patients.The hospital is required to apply 25% of available surgical time in each quarter to public patients in order to receive the full amount of reimbursable fees from the government. If the minimum amount of surgical time is not applied to public patients in each quarter, then the government penalises the hospital by reducing the total reimbursable fees by 5% for that quarter. The hospital receives scheduled fees for each surgical service provided private patients from their health insurers and is also reimbursed by the government for surgical services provided to public patients,according to their respective schedules of coverage. However, there is nearly always a fee gap payable by the patient before the surgery is performed.The hospital pays $60 per hour, as wages, to each staff member in a surgical team (i.e. nurses,technicians, etc.) for each hour in surgery and an extra 50% of the hourly rate for all additional surgery time when a surgery takes longer than the allotted time scheduled by the government. For example, if surgery took 1.5 hours and only 1 hour was allocated by the government, then each staff member received $60 pay for the first hour and then $45 pay for the final half hour.The hospital also acknowledges it incurs a fixed cost of $100 per hour (e.g. for electricity, water,depreciation of equipment and maintenance costs) for each hour a surgical theatre is used. The hospital also pays a fee to each surgeon and anaesthetist for each surgical procedure performed, according to agreed schedules of professional fees for each.The hospital’s surgical services co-ordinator, Ms Sanus is interested in finding ways to improve operational efficiencies and increase the overall profitability of the surgical service. She has hired you as an analyst to assist in developing an informational tool using Microsoft Excel and poses some questions about the performance of the surgical service. She also requires you to make recommendations on how to improve improving the surgical service. Question: To analyse a set of data, and write a brief report, identifying and explaining your insights into the surgical operations of BestHealth Hospital.