You are Isabel Pinzón-Vélez, 41, Operations Director at Imágenes del Pacífico, a diagnostic-imaging network in Cali. Patients wait weeks for an appointment and then hours on the day. The board wants to buy a second MRI scanner. You are not sure the scanner is the problem.
The situation
Imágenes del Pacífico runs five diagnostic-imaging centers across the Valle del Cauca — MRI, CT, ultrasound and X-ray. The flagship center in Cali is the busiest, and it is where the complaints concentrate. Patients wait two to three weeks for an MRI appointment. On the day, they spend most of an afternoon on site. Reviews use the same word over and over: esperar — to wait.
At the last board meeting the proposed fix was a second MRI scanner — roughly COP 1,400M of capital. The medical director's alternative was simpler and cheaper: "the technologists need to work faster." You have spent two weeks with a stopwatch and a clipboard following patients through the flagship center, and what you found does not match either proposal. So before the board approves anything, you are going to show them where a patient's afternoon actually goes.