As Lehigh Valley Health Network begins a move to its new home–the former world headquarters of Allentown institution Mack Trucking–this week, the company hopes to streamline operations by reorganizing administrative departments to better serve its customers. With 960 beds in three hospital facilities, LVHN’s strength has always been on patient care. Working with the resources they had, LVHN’s disparate departments have been spread across the region in different offices. So it’s easy to see why employees relish the opportunity to work as a unit under one roof when the move is complete.
“All those people that are needed in support of health care but are behind the scenes were placed in rental space, wherever we could find room anywhere in the Lehigh Valley,” says LVHN Manager of Health Care Planning Jennifer Fink. “After doing that for a number of years, we took a step back and said ‘whoa, we have 1,000 people in nine different buildings within a 25-mile radius. This is not efficient.”
Fink and her colleagues hope that their fresh start will be a good move for patients by increasing collaboration amongst administrative staff. But lack of unity among staffers isn’t the only cost of having your administration spread across nine buildings. Everything from travel time and expenses to a different pantry and office supply cabinet for each different office amounted to big losses. LVHN hopes the move will mean a fresh start for office workers and will create savings that can be passed on to patients.
“Going from a company where every department has their own supply closet and their own pantry, we have consolidated all that so when you come onto a floor, there is no more ‘this belongs to marketing, this belongs to finance,'” says Fink. “We’ve knocked down those barriers.”
Source: Jennifer Fink, LVHN
Writer: John Steele