Cap task 3 step#1

MBA Capstone Project Cap Task 3: New York Downtown Hospital Briefly describe the client/organization by providing some background and describing the context in which the business problem or need occurs.
New York Downtown Hospital is a community teaching hospital associated with the impressive New York Presbyterian Healthcare scheme and Weill Cornell Medical Institution (Downtown Hospital). This is one of the “ acute care New York hospitals situated in and serving the people of Lower Manhattan” (Downtown Hospital). The New York Downtown Hospital is presently recognized for the provision of regional healthcare services to more than 120, 000 residents in Manhattan region. It also provides a complete matching set of health care services to the inhabitants and visitors of New York City. A majority of the clients that patronize this hospital are women and children. Diagnosis of breast cancer is one of the most common diagnoses done in the hospital. Shockingly, 15% of women who die in this hospital are diagnosed with breast cancer.
Effects of the Problem on New York Downtown Hospital
How is the problem affecting the client/organization? List or describe the issues the problem is causing. (How is the problem showing up in the organization?) When did the organization become aware of the problem? What actions have been taken to mitigate the problem?
Use of ineffective methods to diagnose breast cancer has caused significant damage in the hospital’s image as well as made its operations more costly. Ideally, the state of New York recognizes failure to diagnose as an offense in some situations, and as a result, the hospital has paid huge sums of fines in lost suits whereby clients complain of poor or ineffective diagnosis. This has also created some bad image of the hospital and hence losing clients to other hospitals that use sophisticated and more effective technology to diagnose breast cancer.
What is even more shocking is the fact that use of ineffective methods to diagnose cancer leads to delay in treatment and hence affecting the patient’s prognosis. Furthermore, the longer cancer goes untreated, undetected, or poorly treated, the greater the risk to the patient. In extreme cases, these failures can cause the patient’s death. Following a sequence of customer complaints for the last 5 years, the hospital management led by the President and Chief Executive Officer convened a board meeting to strategize on the way forward in regard to this menace. At the board meeting, a committee was constituted and mandated to foresee the research on new and more effective method of diagnosing breast cancer. To mitigate this problem, the committee proposed implementation of image segmentation, which will potentially determine diagnosis, tissue volumes, localized pathology as well as help in studying anatomical structures.
The Broad Problem Statement
What is the broader problem/need statement that effectively covers all the issues listed above?
Identify the person in the organization who authorized you to resolve the problem.
The large number of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer in New York Downtown hospital has caused the management to invest heavily on R&D in an attempt to establish better ways of treating and detecting cancer in women. These efforts are aimed at getting an alternative to the archaic methods such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and mammography, which have been used by the hospital to screen breast cancer for many years, but which have been found largely ineffective following reports of a high failure rate. The new technique will hopefully increase the cancer detection accuracy rate by more than 50%. Due to the urgency and importance of this issue, Jeffrey Menke, the President and Chief Executive Officer authorized this development to be undertaken with immediate effect.
Functional Areas
What 3 functional areas might be contributing to the problem?
Financial planning
This project will require substantial funds to be spent on purchase of sophisticated equipment that is used in implementation of image segmentation technique. The financial department has recognized the importance if this project and approved the budget that was planned for the first phase of the implementation. Several bids have been placed for the potential vendors and it will be the responsibility of the respective committee members to select the most suitable bidder. However, those who are in charge of bidding will have to keep in mind and ensure that the company procurement policies are strictly followed and they are in line with the budget approval provisions and recommendations.
Research and development
This project entails extensive investigation in order to arrive at the most effective scientific method of screening, which will potentially phase out the old techniques that have somewhat hampered treatments and screening of breast cancer in the New York Downtown Hospital. As such, the project will require a heavy investment in R&D, since there are a multiple of techniques in the market yet the hospital wants to have the best that will meet its unique needs.
Leadership
Successful implementation of this project will require the project manager together with his committee members to work productively and as a united team in order to ensure effective and smooth implementation process. Despite financial and time constraints, the expectations of the project are quite high and hence very high leadership qualities are required to ensure all aspects of the projects are balanced.
References
Downtown Hospital. (n. d.). Retrieved from http://www. downtownhospital. org/