Collaboration In Healthcare

Cost Savings: Collaboration can produce real, measurable results in the way of cost savings from the sharing of best practices across global divisions (Daft, 2008). Most of the studies conducted on the topic shows that the demand of information sharing between organizations, customers, suppliers etc. helps reduce cost of inventory management in the supply chain (Kamalapur, Lyth, & Houshyar, 2013). The goal of collaboration is to maximize product performance and minimize costs by taking advantage of the specialties of collaborating partners that enables the organization to achieve success (Yoo, Gnanasekaran, & Cheng, 2014).

Better decision making: As information sharing is seen as the foundation for any collaboration strategies (Kamalapur,

Collaboration is becoming increasingly critical in many industries to maximize revenue and minimize cost by taking advantage of other’s expertise, health care industry has hardly utilized the advantages of collaboration (Yoo, Gnanasekaran, & Cheng, 2014).

The scenario in a hospital for example is as follows: For example, if a patient exhibiting symptoms of liver cancer is recommended by a hospital specialist to undergo a series of diagnostic tests that might take several months to administer due to the hospital’s limited staff or equipment availability, such a lengthy period of diagnosis may not be appropriate for treating the patient, or other patients with acute illnesses that require more immediate medical attention. If the hospital can outsource some of the required tests to other hospitals that have the available resources to perform the tests more quickly, not only would the patient benefit from more expeditious service, it might even encourage price competition among these hospitals, resulting in cost savings for the out- sourcing hospital as well as the patient (Yoo, Gnanasekaran, & Cheng,

Well this already tells us that people working for Nissan has to travel to its head office that is in Japan, and this leads to high costs of travel and lodging for the employees. Another problem is the huge difference of hours between Japan and U.S.A. Nissan had already been using Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 along with Microsoft Office Live Meeting, a hosted Web conferencing services. But it was not effective for Nissan and they still had the stress of business trips. But the Nissan opted to upgrade it software for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2007, and it improved their decision making process among the organization and its strategic business units around the world. Now everyone can make use of the software and know how decisions are made in the organization and they can also participate in meetings when it comes to for example, come up with a new feature for a Nissan Sentra.

The above mentioned scenario illustrates that collaboration enhances decision-making, making it even faster without wasting any time and improving the performance or productivity in an organization. Using collaboration tools and approaches to enhance the decision-making benefits for every employee who works for the organization.

The statement is as follows: Collaboration enhances decision-making by using collaboration tools or making use of collaboration approaches such as majority voting, and consensus