This week, you will write an essay about managers and quality in health care.
- Explain in detail why financial managers should be concerned with quality initiatives.
- Provide two specific examples of areas in a healthcare organization where quality plays a critical role and explain why.
- Use information from at least one peer-reviewed journal article to support your responses.
Your essay should be 1–2 pages in length and follow APA formatting and citation.
Managers and quality in healthcare
In healthcare organizations, quality improvement is designated as a systematic approach that is guided by data for enhancing the safety and quality of healthcare delivery. Improvement in healthcare safety and quality is enhancing concentration for the healthcare systems as institutions are intending to enhance efficiency by decreasing healthcare costs and assuring high-quality outcomes for patients.
The concern of financial managers with quality initiatives in healthcare organizations is of paramount importance. Any compromise in healthcare can be detrimental to patient health and the organization can encounter financial loss. Quality initiatives are also concerned with the proper utilization of available resources and useful information is generated for making required information and resource allocation. Financial managers are collaborating to attain healthcare quality as several factors are considered to generate revenues for the organization (Cui et al. 2018, p. 774). These important variables involve appropriate diagnostics, a decrease in medical error, education programs, primary care and training to staff, and minimizing waste. Healthcare risk management is a priority for monitoring threats beyond concerns related to patients. Medical records or healthcare facilities have been protected from hackers for preventing fraud or misuse of funds. So financial managers are liable for providing finance and accounting information that enables health managers to attain the goals of the organization.
Two instances of quality initiatives in healthcare are as follows:
Decrease in medication-related adverse events
Advancements in clinical therapeutics have improved patient health but also include certain risks. A medication error can cause patients to experience adverse drug events. Patient safety adheres to the very core of health services. So, quality health services ought to be effective, people-centered, and safe. Appropriate deployment of patient-safety strategies requires leadership capacity, clear policies, and data for driving safety improvements. As errors in medication are caused by failures of humans or processes, it is necessary to adopt expedient process-impediment procedures for identifying inefficiencies, preventable errors, and ineffective care that influences changes associated with systems. These techniques include assessment of performance and findings are used for informing changes. Internal and external benchmarking is utilized for the evaluation of quality performance and patient safety. Internal benchmarking identifies best practices in healthcare organizations. External benchmarking uses comparative data among organizations for identifying improvements to enhance performance. Several quality assurance programs concentrate on issues like oversight committee work, and checking documentation recognized by regulatory organizations. Also, strategies were proposed to improve clinical practice (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, 2022).
Improvement of care coordination among departments
According to (Kuo et al. 2018, p. 225), care coordination is considered essential for addressing fragmented care. The team-driven activity of care coordination organizes and triggers the integration of services. Models of care coordination include resources like the provision of direct practices to external organizations like accountable care organizations and hospitals. Outpatient care coordination involves the delivery of healthcare in bulk amounts via proactive planning of care and effective utilization of resources. Care coordination will result in healthcare encounters unnecessarily. Moreover, deployment of care coordination among departments requires personal training, staffing, family engagement levels, duties of care coordination, sustainability, and care models focused on patients. Also, plans for care coordination ought to be inclusive and methodological. So patients and their families must be engaged at various organizational levels and decision-making processes that include setting goals, planning, and assessing the experience of care integration. Evaluation of practice team capabilities is integral to the success of care planning for targeting domains of quality improvement and transformation of practices. The sustainability and deployment of these efforts need refinement and robust assessment, utilizing the methodology of quality improvement for promoting the inculcation of evidence into healthcare practice and policy.
References
Cui, C., Liu, Y., Hope, A., & Wang, J. (2018). Review of studies on the public–private partnerships (PPP) for infrastructure projects. International journal of project management, 36(5), 773-794. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/YongLiu53/publication/324242945_Review_of_studies_on_the_publicprivate_partnerships_PPP_for_infrastructure_projects/links/5bbde2f192851c4efd5347f9/Review-of-studies-on-the-public-private-partnerships-PPP-for-infrastructure-projects.pdf
Kuo, D. Z., McAllister, J. W., Rossignol, L., Turchi, R. M., & Stille, C. J. (2018). Care coordination for children with medical complexity: whose care is it, anyway?. Pediatrics, 141(Supplement_3), S224-S232. Retrieved from: https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/17658/Kuo_2018_care.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=nncbi.nlm.nih.gov, 2022, tools for quality improvement, retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2682/. [Retrieved on: 9.3.2022]
