Case Study Assignment

According to the text Managerial Ethics in Healthcare: A New Perspective, the following case study is presented for your consideration:

Mountain Children's Health System (MCHS) has three important proposed programs that need funding. In its present economic circumstances it can only fund one. The administrator is asked to make a recommendation to the board, keeping in mind the system's mission to provide high-quality comprehensive healthcare to children in the communities the hospital system serves as well as to retain its leadership in pediatric medical education. Each project will cost approximately $1 million per year. The projects include:

- State-of-the-art oxygenation: technology for supporting patients with cardiac problems who cannot be managed on a ventilator. Approximately eight to ten patients per year need this treatment after surgery, and if this technology were available, approximately 50 percent of those patients would survive. Without new technology young patients will either die or are transferred to a university healthcare facility. MCHS will recover about 80 percent of the cost.

- Kidney transplant service: Currently MCHS has no such service. Approximately ten patients per year are in need of this service and go to university health centers for this operation. MCHS will recover about 70 percent of the cost.

- Rural pediatric healthcare services: In rural areas around MCHS facilities, ill children are not served adequately. A rural clinic would serve around 10,000 patients per year, and the critically ill children would be transported to a hospital in the MCHS system. MCHS would recover about 50 percent of the cost of this clinic and the transportation services.

You are the CEO. Which project would you choose? What are the reasons? (Adapted from Wells 2001.)