Good and appropriate value chain is the key success factor of organizational management.Good and appropriate value chain is the key success factor of organizational management.

   Because of globalization and social change into knowledge based society, almost organization should be adapted themselves to become learning organization and managed for their survival with high customer satisfaction and more than this is to give customer delight. The managers have to make decision in uncertain situation, scarce of resource and response to high efficiency and effectiveness with social responsibility. Strategic planning is a very useful technique for manager to deal with them.

In strategic planning, we have to analyze the internal situation as in our organization. The value chain is one of the methods to internal analysis. The Value chain take us to categorize the activities in the organization (In my sharing, organization is Bantak hospital in Tak province) into 2 groups, one is supportive activities, and another one is basic or core activities.

Core activities in hospital services are entry or registration, assessment, care, discharge and follow-up. These activities are important because they directly effect to patient and patient satisfaction.

Supportive activities in hospital are financial or budgeting management, environment and safety management, human resource management, information system and medical record management and logistics management. These activities don’t directly effect to patient, but indirectly effect to factors that effect to core activities. So, the manager or administrator has to pay more attention to manage these activities. It may be a little bit difference in defining the support activities and depend on each organization. Good and appropriate value chain is the key success factor of organizational management.

I would like to explain the core activities in my experience as following;

1.     Entry or registration: first place that patients visit in hospital service process, to clarify patient health insurance, to find medical record and tell patient to go to which clinic or department they should go for receiving care.

2.     Assessment: When the patient come into each department, health care providers have to assess the patient for caring them as normal, urgent or emergent patients. This is for patient safety, protect patient from dangerous with prolonged waiting time because there are many patients in each day.

3.     Care: to plan and management the care the patient should be received with patient-centered care, integrated care and continuity care. We apply 3CTHER+HELP technique to evaluate the quality of care.

4.     Discharge: there should be discharge planning for each patient when patient will be discharged to their home and to explain the patients and family for prognosis, follow-up, how long to stay in the hospital. And someone may be referred to high level hospital for more appropriate care. The discharge planning should do by multidisciplinary team in the hospital.

5.     Follow-up: this process is focused for continuity care after patient discharged from hospital. There are 3 methods, one is to make appointment to patient, second is home visit and community care and the last one is to follow the patient that sent to higher tier hospital.

"Buddha said that there are a lot of knowledge in the world, they looked like the leaves in all forests, but the main concepts that we could apply to implement them were not more, it seemed as the leaves in one grasp"

Buddha, 3093 B.C.

Phichet  Banyati,

November 28, 2007

ITM, Antwerp