Question

CASE STUDY

Adult and Pediatric Primary Care (APPC), a five-doctor clinic with 40 employees and two offices, is a financially viable, growing organization with an expanding patient base. The practice is five years old, started by two physicians who left a larger group with a goal to provide high-quality care. At the time they started, they hired an experienced medical office manager, a front-desk receptionist, and two medical assistants. Over the past five years, they have added more physicians and staff as patient volumes grew. The physician owners are very cautious about adding cost to the operation, always making sure that patient revenues could appropriately cover their overhead. At a recent practice meeting that included the physician owners and the office manager, the agenda included a discussion point about adding a human resources professional to the administrative team. The office manager indicated that she was spending a significant amount of her time dealing with HR-related duties at the expense of her other duties, such as bill ing management, vendor negotiations, and shopping for an electronic medical records system. Although she felt that she was skilled at hiring and training, she did not feel her competencies included, at the level necessary, the other areas of HR such as legal compliance, performance management, and benefits and compensation management. Consequently, she was recommending hiring an individual with those skills. The physician owners generally agreed with her recommendation but voiced concern about the additional expense of adding a non- revenue-producing staff member and wanted more detail as to what an HR professional would do for a practice their size. The meeting was adjourned without making a final decision regarding adding the HR staff member pending more research by the office manager on the specific duties the HR professional would perform and a cost–benefit analysis on the position.

1. Describe the potential value a human re-sources professional could bring to APPC.

Answer 1

Adult and Pediatric Primary Care (APPC), a five-doctor clinic with 40 employees and two offices, is a financially viable, growing organization with an expanding patient base. The practice is five years old, started by two physicians. They started with hiring an experienced medical office manager, a front-desk receptionist, and two medical assistants. Over the past five years, they have added more physicians and staff as patient volumes grew.

The physician owners are very cautious about adding cost to the operation, always making sure that patient revenues could appropriately cover their overhead.

They are feeling a need of adding a human resources professional to the administrative team.

Current Situation - The office manager was spending a significant amount of her time dealing with HR-related duties at the expense of her other duties, such as billing management, vendor negotiations, and shopping for an electronic medical records system.

The potential value a human resources professional could bring to APPC are a s below

• Develop Human Resource Function for the AAPC so that he can develop the basic HR requirements at the organization, as the organization is growing organization and it will need the HR infrastructure in future.
• Develop structure process for Hiring / Recruitment: being a core HR professional, he will be able to develop a structure recruitment and hiring process for the APPC so that it will be useful for the organization.
• Leading HR work at APPC: Curently office manager is some how managing the HR work for the APPC, but this HR professional will lead the HR function and will develop the adequate capable processes for the APPC organization for its future capability and helpful in future survival as well.
• Legal compliance: The new HR professional will be competent in managing legal compliances for the organization and will make the organization free from legal issues,
• Performance management: This is the biggest HR work in the organization and calls for lot of skills and competency in executing this task for any organization. Thus the new HR professional will lead this work for the APPC and help in managing the satisfaction among employees.
• Benefits and compensation management: the current office manager is not competent in benefits and compensation management as it is not her core area, so new HR professional will be competent enough to develop strong process for benefits and compensation management for APPC.
• Motivation and empowerment programs: The new HR professional will be able to develop process around motivation and empowerments so that the organization will be befitted.
• Good culture, reward, recognition, diversity: the new HR professional will be able to develop good process around this points which will make the APPC more competent in future.