Akron_Hospital

Introduction Akron Children’s Hospital faced stiff competition for recognition in the level of care they provided to their patients in comparison to the two other hospitals in the area that also had specialized programs for children. Akron Children’s Hospital turned to Marcus Thomas LLC, to help them conduct the needed research into their own operation and how best to market or change in order to compete with the other two hospitals. Marcus Thomas first step was to become a fly on the wall in side the hospital and watch the interactions between the staff and the patients, watching the patients throughout the entire process of there stay. This is a type of behavioral observation. Behavioral observation offers a couple advantages in this particular situation. Observing children is one of the only ways to get information on them (Cooper, 2011). Also observation will allow the company to note any behavior or activity that is so routine that members’ of the staff may not recognize it as part of the process. In this instance of behavioral observation the company choose well as the negative aspects of observing were downplayed as it all occurred in the hospital and there was no chance at a change of venue. The largest possible negative is that the staff was aware of being observed. The simple act of observation can change the way a member of the staff would interact with a patient if the staff perceived a threat (Cooper, 2011). In this particular instance the negative to Observational behavior study may have played into their hands. Through this research Marcus Thomas came up with a marketing strategy the emphasized how the staff interacted and expended its own energy towards the patients, effectively putting the patients first in its concerns. So in this case even if the observational research unwittingly created an environment where the staff felt a higher need to attend to the patients needs, it did create a way to market and differentiate Akron Children’s Hospital from its competitors. It is possible that the results of the observational behavior research could have been different had Marcus Thomas and company conducted observation utilizing cameras already in place around the hospital and perhaps placing recording devices around the hospital to pick up on the verbal interaction. Ohio is not an all party state where every party in a conversation has to be aware of a recording of a conversation (Flynn, 2008) but conducting the research in this way could have had much broader and further reaching negative impact upon the hospital after information of how the research was conducted got out. All things considered they way the observational research was done was probably the best way available. The research into the hospital didn’t stop after the observational research. Marcus Thomas also used a focus group and survey methods to gather more data. The focus group concentrated on parents and the way they made choices as to which care provider to go to for their children. The third step was to conduct a phone survey where parents were asked to evaluate several criteria, not all of the parents had experience with Akron Children’s Hospital some had experience with one of the two rival hospitals in the area. In both the phone survey and the focus group a skewing of the data possibly occurred. In none of the information presented does it indicate that the mother of a child needing care is more likely to make the decision on where they will seek care, but in both instances of the phone survey and the focus group the majority of participants were female. Without knowing to what degree gender is playing a role in the decision making of where a patient will be placed the focus group should have balanced out between male and female parents. A research project in Krakow, Poland indicates that men may react with less emotion then women when confronted with danger, activity in the brain indicating that men are less emotional and depend more on the fight or flight reaction of the brain (BBC, 2009). Armed with that information and the idea that bringing a child to a hospital for a serious problem would invoke in most parents a sense of danger surrounding their child it would behoove both the research company and the hospital how both genders react to the information equally. Marcus Thomas should have also considered the maximum distance that a patient is willing to travel to receive aid. This data could easily be attained by comparing zip code data of the patients with the locations of the hospitals, using that data Marcus Thomas could have calculated two things where if at all a second location may be advantageous so as not to have one hospital impacting the other by pulling patients from each other. The other information they could have garnered is where the majority of patients came from either from the high or low socioeconomic group, allowing the company to either focus market in which they target a particular group or to multi market advertise where one idea is marketed to one socioeconomic group to appeal to them and another ideal is marketed to a different socioeconomic group that does not respond to the first idea. Marcus Thomas research into the hospitals in the area of Akron Children’s Hospital and the conduct surrounding them was conducted in a valid method, and in such a way as to minimize liability and the negatives associated with particular research methods.