Erlanger Health System: Hospital Case Analysis

Using Porter’s five forces model to identify the determinants of performance against my organization I found that intense existing rivalry against other area hospitals. I am employed at Erlanger Health System which is categorized as a non-profit academic hospital (Erlanger Health System, 2018, para. 1). A non-profit hospital means they provide free care to patients that are willing be put on a waiting list for funding (Andritsos & Aflaki, 2015). Other hospitals that are in the area are for-profit hospitals which will charge a fee but will have less waiting time for elective patient care. The need to have a for-profit may best be suited when the hospital market is very competitive (Andritsos & Aflaki, 2015). We have for-profit hospitals in our …show more content…
It is possible for a patient to want to go to a local rival hospital if customer service or if they feel that staff are more cautious in another facility. If a patient knows that a rival hospital does not have a large volume of patients in the emergency room, a patient may feel that they will be seen faster at this hospital versus a large trauma hospital that you may spends hours at before you can be seen. At smaller hospitals there will be less patient rooms therefore the nurse to patient ratio is significantly lower than our large facility. If a smaller for-profit hospital were to employee a well-known highly skilled doctor to their facility it is possible that patients will want to seek medical treatment from this doctor or surgeon because of their credibility. For example, if that surgeon was the first to successfully transplant a total robotic heart which would be new in technology, I could only imagine that would steal patients from my facility because my surgeons have never completed such an advanced treatment for heart care. This would cause a threat to substitute one hospital’s products over another in the same …show more content…
For example if competitors want to purchase cleaning solutions they obviously will need to buy more cleaning solutions to accommodate all of their hospital chains versus my hospital that only owns 6 hospitals which will not be buying as much in bulk. Therefore, the competitor is saving more money for quantity of bulk purchased items. The competitors can buy in bulk for products that they can charge a patient for as well, such as water mugs, non-slip socks, crutches, and braces for wrists or ankles. When they buy in bulk to receive a discount but still charge full price for the item they are making more of a profit than that of a company that does not get a large discount for buying in a large