Service Journal: Question 10 of 15

1. Identify and briefly describe (1-2 sentences) a problem that could occur early in your focal organization's service delivery process that could go undetected by the customer until the end of service delivery. Describe the costs of service recovery if that problem is not identified until the end of the service process:

Patient test results could be transcribed. Thus a healthy individual would have a positive test result ie HIV AIDS and the un healthy individual would have a negative result. If unidentified it would cause anxiety for one and a false sence of hope for the other. Could you imagine telling someone oops uh... we accidentally mixed your test results with another patient your really do/don't have HIV AIDS. The cost is found in future loss of sales, cost of tracking the error, cost of providing service (the false positive result would incur additional costs in counselling, repeat visists, and pharmaceutical expenses), the cost of not providing service to the false negative patient (infection of others and deteriorated health), and the many hours spent by physicians and staff in treatment.

2. Design a plan for assuring that quality problems which are discovered are 1) adequately remedied with the customer; and 2) are appropriate avoided in the future.

1) Customers should recieve a rebate for all tests and expenses incured due to the error. Healthcare staff who created and perpetuated the error must appologize and be held responsible. Finally to restore goodwill IHC could offer consessions on future patient services.

2) For this process a double verification of results could be handled prior to releasing test results to physicians. One technologist types in the results and checks their work and then another would verify results and release results to the physician. In addition a final report form of all patient test results could be generated every 48 hours and reviewed by management. If something doesn't fit it could be revealed to physician possibly before they release results to the patient.
Those who catch errors must be rewarded. This would help to increase awareness by attaching employee bonuses to quality of performance.