Organizational Change Plan – Part I
Health care is in a constant state of change. Recently Affordable Care Act (ACO) is has organizations of health care providers that agrees to be accountable for the quality, cost, and overall care of Medicare beneficiaries (Seifert, 2011). ACO emphasizes controlling health care costs but not without adhering to quality standards (Seifert, 2011). As part of these efforts, ACOs would recommend the use of electronic supply documentation. In the past, the traditional practice for reimbursement was on a fee for service basis (Cohen, Petrone, & Probst, 1998). The operating room is shifting toward case based payment. With the focus of health care providers working to provide quality care at the lowest possible cost.
“Surgical services impact on more than fifty percent of the economic performance of a hospital. Hospital executives view the operating room as a major cost center, but few view it as a principal profit center. An efficiently run operating room with definable revenues and costs can prove to be an invaluable asset to the entire organization” (Cohen et al., 1998, para. 2).
The current program that the operating room (OR) is running cannot break down the cost of the supplies. Therefore, the hospital is unable to do cost analysis on each individual case in the OR. This can be a loss of revenue within the department. With this in mind the enterprise developed a program called Supply Information Management System or also known as SIMS. This program was implemented in two out of three sites. Adopting this system at the last site will benefit the hospital individually but as an enterprise.
There are many factors that must be taken into account before the implementation of supply information management system (SIMS). With any change, the culture of the organization at this site must be assessed. The assessment must include the organization’s goals, beliefs, and management styles of the individuals who work within. The implementation of SIMS cannot be accomplished if the culture does not foster commitment to the change. In order to manage the change that will come with implementing SIMS, the staff must have a clear plan, skills assessed, resources supplied, incentives offered and, illustrated, and the customer support (Cohen et al., 1998).
To make the SIMS effective, need to look at Lewin’s model of change. First step of Lewin’s model of change is unfreezing, this stage involves finding methods of making it possible for staff to let go of an old habits that was counterproductive in some way. This is the stage where the desire to change occurs, or at least the recognition that change is needed (Kaminski, 2011). Within the operating room (OR), the need to provide quality care at the lowest cost is becoming the norm. To make these changes we need to implement a system, such as SIMS to help manage the operating room daily supply change and the par levels within the department. Imperatives for change are realized through re-educational activities such as team building, personal development, brainstorming, and most important dialogue. The more transparent and inclusive the process is, the more readily people will move through the unfreezing stage (Kaminski, 2011).
Lewin’s second stage is the process of change. During this stage SIMS will be introduced to the staff and convinced that this will be better than the old way. It will be the most challenging stage because the people involved will be sharing their thoughts, feelings and, behavior toward the change. This is when changes can be made to SIMS to make it more beneficial for current site it is being applied.
The final stage of Lewin’s theory applied is to establish the change as a new process, so it now becomes standard practice or status quo. With SIMS, staff will be documenting the OR charges on a patient to patient basis the, OR will have more accurate charges. Also be able to account for supplies and par level of supplies within the department.
SIMS was developed by a large enterprise that has three group sites, currently employee for the third group in the enterprise. Currently the other campuses or groups are using SIMS for their electronic documentation on supplies. The organization has decided to standardize across the board. To help with the change, bring in liaisons for the utilization of the system and this organization has an enormous cache of resources at an enterprise level. The ability to maintain and implement the SIMS system at three group sites allowed for the fixed cost of the system to be allocated and ultimately more beneficial to each region.
Some of the influence’s that may influence the proposed change, is attitude toward changing how they document charges, the reasoning for the change, how staff interprets the change. It is hard for an employee to change the way they have been documenting charges for a long time. The goal is to show the staff that SIMS is the new way and how much easier it will be to document supplies.
In conclusion, the Affordable Care Act has made the operating room as a team look at how we manage our costs with supplies. In return the enterprise or organization as a whole decided to use one electronic system called SIMS. SIMS needs to be implemented at the last of the three groups. When implementing SIMS, need to follow Kurt Lewin’s Model of Change. With this model there is three steps unfreeze, change and. refreeze. At each step we are considering how to implement the change with little to no resistance. SIMS was developed within the organization and has a large internal and external support system when going live with the documentation.

References
Cohen, E., Petrone, A., & Probst, R. (1998). Surgical information systems. Retrieved from http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/90-853/medis.dir/Surgical.html
Kaminiski, J. (2011). Theory appliedto informatics - Lewin’s Change Theory. Retrieved from http://cjni.net/journal/?p=1210
Seifert, P. C. (2011, June). Accountable care: Is it solely cost conscious? Association of Operating Room Nurses. AORN Journal, 93, 647-649. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.apollolibrary.com/docview/868901444