Thomson Edision SOP720 module 2 forums

In Discussion Forum 2, post your response to the following discussion question. Reply to at least two classmates’ responses by the date indicated in the course Calendar.

• Paul O’Neill, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, estimates that arguably half of the $2 trillion a year that Americans spend on health care is needlessly wasted. Brainstorm up to 10 blue-sky ideas to solve the following problems:
• A typical retail pharmacy spends 20 percent of its time playing telephone tag with doctors trying to find out what the intent was for a given prescription.
• After the person responsible for filling the prescription determines what they think they are supposed to do, errors can be made even in filling the prescription. For example, administering an adult dose (rather than the dose for a premature baby) of Heparin in a preemie ICU is fatal.
• Drugs get distributed at a hospital on a batch basis. For example, carts can be filled on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. A huge volume of drugs can come back on Monday because they are not consumed on the wards between Friday and Monday, patient conditions changed, or the doctor decided on a different intervention. A technician spends the rest of the day restocking the shelves with the returns and 40 percent of the intravenous material prepared on Friday morning are poured down the drain,
• Sometimes the administration of the drug was not done on the agreed schedule, because the nurses were busy doing something else.
• For every bed in acute care hospital system, someone falls during the year. Most falls occur after 11 P.M. and before 6 A.M. Sometimes a bone is fractured, leading to immobilization and the pneumonia.
• One in every 14 people who goes to a U.S. hospital gets an infection they did not bring with them.

Discussion Forum 3, post your response to the following discussion question. Reply to at least two classmates’ responses by the date indicated in the course Calendar.

· Recently, the Polish General Corporation, well-known for manufacturing appliance and automobile parts initiated a $13 billion project to produce automobiles. A great deal of learning on the part of management and employee was required. Even though pressure was mounting to get a new product to market in early 2013, the production manager of the newly-formed automobile division insisted on almost a year of trial runs before sales started because workers have to do their jobs 60 to 100 times before they can memorize the right sequence. The launch date was set for early 2014. What are the consequences of using this approach to enter the market with a new product?