Merger Heuristic – Due Module 1
From the provided list of failing healthcare organizations (attached), choose two that you will use continuously throughout this course. Your task this week will be to draw from the resources provided, to develop a heuristic for evaluating the organizations against one another. Your heuristic will be a list of criteria used to guide and standardize the process of your analysis.— focus on providing accurate analyses of these rural healthcare organizations and the financial situations in which they find themselves.
The goal: Give the CEOs an accurate assessment of the situation so that they can make an informed decision on which of the organizations to merge with.
Basically, what will you be looking for, and how will you assess what you find?
The heuristic must address the following aspects:
· Mission, vision and values (organizational identity)
· Medicare / medicaid and other forms of reimbursement
· Expenditures (including staffing)
· Overall financial status/stability
The heuristic you develop must have at least 10 criteria. For each criterion, detail the important factors that you think you should investigate as part of your analysis of merger candidates. Define criteria that you will be able to investigate in the process of completing this final project, and keep in mind that you will be using public documents for this analysis. TEMPLATE ATTACHED; please submit the template with the descriptions of the criteria filled out.
For example, here is a criterion for a heuristic intended to systematize the evaluation of a car:
· “Transmission: The car is able shift up, and down, through all of its gears. It does not make any weird noises, or jump forward or backward, or present any additional resistance between any two gears more than between any others.”
With that one criterion defined, you can use it to evaluate the transmission of any car, and compare the evaluations of multiple cars. For instance:
· Car A: Shifts up and down through all of its gears, but hesitates shifting down from third to second when decelerating.
· Car B: Shifts up and down through all of its gears. No issues between any two gears going up or down.
This heuristic criterion allowed us to quickly and clearly standardize our evaluation of two distinct vehicles in a way that is specific and useful for anyone reading our findings.
When you are finished creating the heuristic – complete with 10 criteria, their descriptions and the factors you will analyze for each of them as a Word document.
