Strategies To Cut Down High Healthcare Costs: An Essay.

1. The effect your practicum project had on the development of the competency you identified as being the most relevant to your practicum project during Week 4.

2. Did your project help facilitate the development of the competency or did it hinder it?.

3. Any areas of the program that you feel need improvement and propose possible solutions that would improve the program and add to the practicum experience.

Observations while conducting practical assessment

Increasing healthcare related costs is the primary concern for the healthcare department of America. According to the governmental data of American government’s healthcare department, in the year 2008, healthcare related costs increased up to $2.4 trillion and contributed with 16% in the total GDP of America (Catlin & Cowan, 2015). Therefore, I chose the strategies to cut down high healthcare costs by reducing the amount of wastes in resources related to unnecessary tests. For this purpose, the management service of Dickinson Hospital situated in rural area of United States, in which the physicians used certain model of competency to decide medical tests which are unnecessary and elimination of which can reduce high healthcare costs (Tilburt et al., 2013). In this reflective analysis I will be highlighting the important aspect of the competency in the week 4 practicum assessment and will discuss the way the practical assessment facilitated the development of competency. Further, I will be highlighting the areas in which the program can be improved and will suggest possible solutions to improve the program.

While conducting the practical assessment in the Dickinson hospital, I observed that maximum of local rural individuals are unable to attain quality healthcare due to the increasing cost of healthcare service in that hospital. Hence, the hospital management decided to apply several means, which could help to reduce the healthcare related costs for the benefits of the local population (Trepanier & Crenshaw, 2013). Therefore, they used models such as AONE Nursing leader competency model, which helps the each leadership in the healthcare service to evaluate their competency with the core system. Further, if any lack identified, it helps the executives by providing them curriculum guidelines, educational trainings, and enough knowledge to reinforce the knowledge, so that proper and adequate usage of resources can be maintained. This competency bears much importance as through this model fur aspects of management system such as communication and relationship management, knowledge of the healthcare related environment, professionalism skills and business skills and principles can be efficiently maintained (Huppertz et al., 2014).

While conducting my assessment, I observed that as my assessment topic was the prime concern for the healthcare facility and therefore they implemented the AONE model of competency in their facility. The most important competency it developed in the healthcare providers and the staff in the facility was they become open to discussions and keen to know and learn newer technologies so that the extra healthcare related costs can be eliminated from the service. Therefore, the ability to accept newer education and technology was the biggest competency the AONE model was able to implement in the healthcare system.

Improvements needed for the healthcare facility

Several means, through which my practical assessment helped the healthcare facility to think about healthcare cost reduction and development was using strategies that helped the healthcare facilities to be more cost effective and care effective (Melnyk et al., 2014). I observed that the healthcare facilities undertook cost effective analysis to understand the quantity of healthcare related to health and not in the monetary terms. They analyzed the specific intervention that was able to save the life of a patient using less resource and cost-effective process and in the process they analyzed the number of diarrhea patient, cardiac disease and tuberculosis related patient, whose life has been saved using cost effective and improved quality of healthcare intervention (Rozensky & Janicke, 2012). In this process of comparison of competencies, more than two interventions were included within which, the most competent and cost effective intervention. Further, to practically prove the statement, they conducted competency practical assessment in which, two groups of a specific disease related patients were included and the physicians applied the interventions included in the competency comparison and applied related immunization or medication process. Finally, through this process, they were able to find out the care effective and cost effective nursing intervention (Chalkidou et al., 2014).

Furthermore, with cost effective means, the healthcare facilities also conducted care effective research and through evidence based practice, compared the cost effective intervention is able to fulfill the criteria of care effective practice or not. Moreover, the nursing ethics, code of conduct, and the criteria for person-centered healthcare are also compared with the process (Olsson et al., 2013). Finally, the facilities compared the healthcare intervention with the government driven primary healthcare intervention and assessed its cost-effectiveness, accessibility and range of application. Therefore, from this instance, it is evident that my chosen project let the hospital authority to think about the healthcare needs of rural people having low socio-economic status in their vicinity (Patterson & Krouse, 2015). Hence, they applied the AONE competency model in their healthcare facility, which made the higher authority competent to necessary and cost effective changes in the process. on the other hand, this project also determined that the hospital authority made their management system competent to newer system by including aspects such as safety, diversity, effective communication, patient centered care and influential behavior in the system so that quality of the healthcare can be enhanced using this overall development approach (Chalkidou et al., 2014).

Conclusion

The location of Dickinson Hospital was near to the rural United States and due to which, maximum of the patients who used to seek healthcare service in the hospital were belong to low socio-economic status. Therefore, increasing healthcare costs were unbearable for them. This was my protect topic, and while conducting the assessment in that hospital, I observed several changes in the staff as well as management process with primary aim to make the healthcare process care effective and cost effective (Dozier, Grunig & Grunig, 2013). However, the first Mistake the organization did while implementing improvement was not informing employees about the change management. This leads to unrest in the employees as they were unable to stabilize their work process according to the new cost effective process. Therefore. The first improvement I think the management should implement in process is regarding the implementation of change in the organization (Kim et al., 2012). Further, for the analysis of cost effective intervention, the healthcare workers conducted survey within the organization, so that a shared vision of the healthcare workers can be collected and depending on that decision making about the patient centered care can be finalized by the leadership. This will further help the workers of the organization to work in an inter-professional teams that will enhance the knowledge of healthcare professionals about a wide array of topics and through which, effective management practices will be successfully implemented. Hence, these are few of the areas such as management team, communication between employees in the Dickinson Hospital that needs improvement according to me and hence, I have suggested few ways through which the objectives can be achieved (Patterson & Krouse, 2015).

Conclusion

As the world economy is progressing, healthcare has become one of the major concern for the human civilization as increasing cost and expensive medication has detached a bigger section of population from the modern healthcare services. Therefore, I decided to conduct a practicum assessment on the strategy that the Dickinson Hospital applied in their management system that will help to tie the patients with low socio-economic status to the quality healthcare system. The Authorities utilized the AONE model of competency and using that they focused on the competency of interventions with cost effective and high quality care, further it helped to increase the competency level of healthcare professional to adopt new system and take account of aspects such as inter-personal communication, patient-physician relationship, using interventions that has the ability to treat patient cost effectively and prescribing necessary and important tests needed for the identification of disease. However, the process laced several aspects and for the overall improvement of the healthcare management system of Dickinson hospital, few suggestions were provided in the assignment as well.

References

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