Hospital as a Business for Flourishing

The healthcare sector in the Western world is in the midst of a significant change. Most healthcare organizations are going through the grueling process of having to make decisions and staying updated in a world where technology, medical information, demographics of patients and relationships between other healthcare systems are constantly changing (Cohen et al., 2004). Besides, governments throughout the developed world have been under pressure to reduce healthcare costs, while improving the quality of care (Howie & Erickson, 2002; McCue, 1997; Segesten, Lundgren & Lindström, 1998). In such an environment, healthcare service providers are finding it increasingly difficult to understand the far-reaching social impact of their services. This project uses the concept of flourishing to help clinicians and administrators in a hospital to analyze their current service offerings, find gaps and come up with recommendations to improve the same. Keyes’ (1998, 2002) defined human flourishing as the sum of qualities that would ensure a healthy sense of well-being and social integration. There is a special focus on understanding the context and stakeholders using the adapted social ecosystem model of Bronfenbrenner (1979), which will help in identifying functions and measures of flourishing across a social system. Using the Flourishing Business Canvas (Upward and Jones, 2016), this research project explores ways of impact definition and evaluation and also measures social and environmental benefits which will help decision makers in a healthcare setting. The research looks at relevant literature in the field of business models, sustainability, and flourishing, with health care as the context. This action-led design research introduced a business modeling artifact (the Flourishing Business canvas) to a group of decision makers at the level of director and managers, in North York General Hospital in a generative workshop session. The participants are encouraged to look at their service lines as businesses and map out that out on the canvas in the form of a model. Their observation, reactions, and data from the canvases are recorded. This and data from interviews with other clinical directors are tallied and analyzed to look for common challenges faced by the hospital and areas of opportunities. The unique contribution is the design of a process and method for representing conditions and elements of flourishing within healthcare service lines: a business process that is currently desired but unavailable to organizations (Jones, 2016, personal conversation). The research findings are used to come up with a design proposal which could be used to use the data from the proposed new process