Applying the O.B Mod. to the Healthcare Industry

Applying the O.B Mod. to the Healthcare Industry

Organizational Behavior MGMT 630
Instructor: Dr. August Bruehlman
Chadron State College

Abstract The healthcare industry, as a whole, is plagued with errors that result in tens of thousands of deaths and costs several billion dollars in the United States yearly. As these errors cost both human lives and have huge financial impacts on organizations they must be improved upon. Improving upon issues in the healthcare industry has proved to be very challenging with one of the primary difficulties being that the healthcare industry is entirely dependent on a human process, and therefore it becomes difficult to identify or even quantify the causes of the problem. Therefore it is the primary position of this paper, that to reduce these errors in the healthcare industry an organizational behavior approach will need to be taken.
Organizational behavior is defined as the understanding, predicting and management of human behavior. If human behavior can be managed correctly in the healthcare industry then error rates can be substantially reduced resulting in the desired lowering effect of errors in the healthcare system. Perhaps the most successful tool in organizational behavior at this time for altering behaviors the organizational behavior modification model (a.k.a. O.B. Mod.) as it has been proven in many organizations to increase employee productivity and accuracy. However, this process has just started to be absorbed into the healthcare system. This O.B. Mod., if used in the healthcare system, could not only save millions of dollars per year it may also save lives by reduction of medical errors. The following paper will provide general background of the O.B. Mod., detail several of the problems in the healthcare industry that could be improved by the O.B. Mod., show how the application of the O.B. Mod. can be used to reduce mediation errors, and conclude with the factors that will be critical

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