Essay on Integrating Quality and Strategy in Healthcare Organizations

The main problem is health disparity caused by increasing costs of care and lack of access to quality health. Low and middle-income groups cannot afford the rising costs of care, and health insurances. It is caused by lack of modern technological equipment which has the capability to increase the quality of health care at a lower cost (Arling & Mueller, 2005). Low income people cannot receive high quality health care because they cannot afford to pay health insurance as compared to high income group who have health insurance. Performance indicators that can be used to measure quality health care in various hospitals include customer service based on the patient feedback on the overall performance of the hospital on parameters such as housekeeping and billing (Degenholtz & Kling, 2006). Nursing scorecard, patient care, and even incidents are other performance indicators that can be used to understand the quality of nursing in hospitals.

Two new concepts that were meaningful to me include the transformation of healthcare leadership and integrating quality and strategy in healthcare organizations. These two concepts are of great interest to me because they affect my profession directly (Maccoby, M et al, 2013). Transformation of healthcare leadership ensures that the organization implements change that can help it simple mistakes that usually hurt patients, cause inconsistency of diagnosis and uninhibited costs. This concept can help me understand how to increase collaboration among clinicians and increase focus on patient needs rather than focusing on other issues that do not improve quality of health care (Sadeghi & Shabot, 2013). In addition, integrating quality and strategy in health care is also another important concept in this unit. It ensures there is collaboration among all healthcare staffs without reinforcing the separation of physicians, nurses, technicians and other professionals (Madsen, 2012). This concept does not allow healthcare workers to work independently but allow healthcare professionals to focus on the needs of patients which translates into quality health care and reduces the cost of healthcare services.

References

Arling, G & Mueller, C., (2005). Future development of nursing home quality indicators. The Gerontologist,45, 147-156.

Degenholtz, H. B & Kling, K. C., (2006). Predicting nursing home residents' quality of life from external indicators. Health Services Research,41, 335-356.

Maccoby, M., Norman, C., Norman, C. J., & Margolies, R. (2013). Transforming healthcare leadership: A systems guide to improve patient care, decrease costs, and improve population health. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Madsen, L. (2012). Healthcare business intelligence: A guide to empowering successful data reporting and analytics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.

Sadeghi, S. & Shabot, M. (2013). Integrating quality and strategy in healthcare organizations. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.