Hospital Re-engineering reasonably good insight into hospital re-engineering has been provided in the article entitled "Hospital reengineering: An evolving management innovation: History, current status and future direction" in the Journal of Health and Human Services Administration, Harrisburg, Spring 2001. Re-engineering is basically undertaking to incorporate some major changes in the organization with the foresight of making some dramatic improvements. Improvements usually for an organization would be the cutting down of costs. It has been rightly stated that the original idea of reengineering has been modified and implemented as restructuring. Restructuring forms the major part of reengineering and both these terms have been used interchangeably. Many major corporations adopted reengineering and many others blindly followed suit. The question remains 'is reengineering suitable for Hospitals?' There are some additional points that have to be considered in this regard. The authors of the article Stephen Lee Walston, Linda D. Urden, and Patricia Sullivan correctly states that reengineering cannot be described as an utter failure since some hospitals continue to do reengineering. But is it really worth restructuring or is it better to resist change? Though the authors have outlined some of the factors that could lead to the failure of reengineering there are some more aspects that have to be considered in this regard. One important factor has not been dealt with. In a national survey-based research it was found that reengineering was alone was not the cause that led to dramatic improvements (or in terms of hospitals...

Hospitals have to consider the procedure as to how the change can be implemented. It is not just changing that matters but the manner in which that change is brought about is equally important. (Walston, 2000) (Tushman and Romanelli, 1985) (Mezias and Glynn, 1993). An improperly planned change can lead to negative outcomes.
It is also important to analyze whether reengineering is really required for the organization instead of following in the footsteps of other organizations blindly. Again they should not be biased by opinions that reengineering is a failure. The primary problem is in determining whether the current organization structure is too complex and cumbersome. If it is, then there is reason for change. Though reengineering may seem to provide significant benefits at first sight, an in-depth study of the effects of reengineering has to be carried out before implementation. It has rightly been said that even those organizations that claimed to have had improvements may in reality have had a negative impact because of reengineering. Reengineering tries to simplify the structure of an organization and hospitals should be careful not to reduce the number of departments with the hope that significant costs will be reduced. For example: reducing from more than 30 departments to just 2 departments might reduce the time spent in meetings and number of committees etc. But it could also lead to the loss of autonomy. Though the departments still exist under one of the two major departments, there is a good chance that such restructuring could…