Organizational Structure of St. Vincent Hospital

Organizational Structure of St. Vincent Hospital

Introduction

A health care organization must be agile and well controlled at the same time. St. Vincent Hospital, Massachusetts utilizes a hierarchical structure along with functionally shorter organizational design that enables effective control over systems, procedures, records, and performance. The same system also facilitates agility in providing fast and effective health care to patients. This paper analyzes the organizational structure of the hospital relative to its goals.

Discussion

Organizational structure determines how job functions are formally divided, grouped, carried out, coordinated and reported. There are six essential elements that managers need to know when they devise an organization:

Specialization in jobs - the extent to which tasks are further divided into separate jobs. Most assembly line type jobs fall in this category.

Departmentalization - the grounds on which jobs are clustered together. The easiest way of doing this is by function (e.g., distribution, manufacturing, and marketing). It could also be on the basis of territory or product (e.g. east coast office, west coast office).

Chain of command -the line of authority, that shows who reports to whom.

Span of control - the number of direct subordinates a manager can efficiently and effectively manage.

The degree of centralization - the extent to which decision making rests with a single person or group of people in the organization. Decentralization is lower-level employees make decisions.

Formalization -standardization of jobs in the organization (www.emaytrix.com).

St Vincent Hospital, Massachusetts Organizational Structure

The Administrative team at St. Vincents is headed by the President and CEO and the Chief Operating Officer. Directly reporting to them are Vice presidents (Clinical Operations, Quality and Patient Safety, Ambulatory services, Preoperative services, Human Resources, Facilities and In-patient services). The Chief Financial Officer, Chief Medical Officer and Director Mission Integration also report directly to the President. Therefore, we can say that ...