Healthcare Environment Paper
Better patient outcomes necessitate, beneath the surface, a group of hardworking healthcare professionals who, despite the challenges, give their all to uphold their professional mandate. Healthcare providers may strive to meet their objectives by operating on a tight budget, with limited resources and low staffing.
Rising healthcare costs caused by fee-for-service payment systems, a growing population and increased health demands, newer technologies, and an unscrupulous pool of healthcare providers impede the delivery of effective healthcare services (Bush, 2018). The goal of this discussion, with a focus on rising healthcare costs, is to highlight how it affects my work setting, as well as provide two article summaries addressing the issue and potential solutions.
The Rising Healthcare Costs and their Impact on My Work Setting
The rising cost of healthcare is impeding service delivery and limiting access. Vulnerable populations, such as Latin Americans, face the most disruptions in medical care (Vogenberg & Santilli, 2018). Furthermore, even those with health insurance face cost-related barriers to accessing healthcare.
In my facility, rising healthcare costs result in decreased access and utilization of healthcare services, a decrease in the number of patients seeing their primary care doctors, and, as a result, low hospital revenues. The impact is also felt by the public health system, where the availability of healthcare amenities is limited due to rising healthcare costs. To address the issue, my facility accepts both public and private medical insurance.
Other hospital organizations employ a variety of approaches, such as nurse practitioner (NP)-physician comanagement and encouraging advanced practice clinicians to practice to their full scope of practice. In 2020, Grady provided more than $543 million for the care of the uninsured and low-income neighbors. The community benefit has increased from 21% in 2017 to 25% in 2020. As a result, more people have continued to access quality healthcare services.
Summary of Articles
Norful, A. A., de Jacq, K., Carlino, R., & Poghosyan, L. (2018). Nurse practitioner–physician comanagement: A theoretical model to alleviate primary care strain. Annals of Family Medicine, 16(3), 250–256. https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.2230
The management of patients by multiple primary care providers is thought to be a potential solution to reducing primary care strain. Norful et al. (2018) reviewed 156 studies and interviewed 26 NPs to determine the impact of patient comanagement.
According to Norful et al. (2018), comanagement is defined as two primary care professionals (an NP and a physician) jointly sharing the responsibilities and all tasks needed to manage the health needs of the same patient. Three important themes emerged from the literature search as the pillars of comanagement: effective communication, mutual respect and trust, and shared philosophy of care.
The best communication strategies that promoted comanagement were timely information exchange between the NP and the physician, full access to each other’s patient care documentation, and the use of a mutual medical language.
Respect and trust were fostered through mutual respect of disciplines, trust in each other’s care decisions, and recognition of each other’s contribution to patient care. Both provider parties are encouraged to develop mutual care goals and agreement on the rationale for the care plan to ensure clinical alignment.
The NP interviews showed that successful collaboration could reduce individual workload, avoid burnout, improve patient care quality, and lead to increased patient access to care, thereby providing a potential solution to rising healthcare costs. While NPs are an important part of patient comanagement, the study expresses concern that legal and organizational barriers may limit their scope of practice.
Auerbach, D. I., Staiger, D. O., & Buerhaus, P. I. (2018). Growing ranks of advanced practice clinicians — implications for the physician workforce. The New England Journal of Medicine, 378(25), 2358–2360. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp1801869
For a long time, doctors were the vast majority of healthcare professionals who could diagnose, treat, and prescribe medications to patients. However, the growing global population with increased healthcare demands, as well as the increasing use of technologies in healthcare, have resulted in a shortage of physicians available to meet patient demands. As a result, there is a growing demand for healthcare professionals with equal or nearly equal knowledge and skills as physicians to fill the void.
NPs and physician assistants (PAs), according to Auerbach et al. (2018), are increasingly filling physician roles in various settings. This is supported by statistics showing that the number of NPs increased from 282 to 424 between 2000 and 2016 (Auerbach et al., 2018).
Broome and Marshall (2020) and Pereira and Bowers (2020) further underpin the NPs’ significance in healthcare, stating that they provide care at relatively lower costs than physicians. Furthermore, NPs earn lower wages than physicians, making them economically viable. The negative impact of the strategies will be the high cost of care. This will affect most people in vulnerable populations like the Latinos. As a result, it will be hard to achieve affordable care for all.
Conclusion
The provision of healthcare services faces numerous challenges, including the rising cost of care. This impacts patient access and utilization of healthcare services and the availability of healthcare amenities. Regardless of the obstacles, healthcare delivery must continue.
Clinicians have thus devised strategies to reduce the costs of care services, intending to increase access to healthcare services while also increasing revenue. Co-management, in which a patient is cared for by both an NP and a physician, has proven to be a viable solution.
Furthermore, the increased pool of NPs and PAs in healthcare has proven to be cost-effective strategies for providing care services. While not all of these strategies will work for every organization, it is up to the organization to determine which strategy best fits its objectives.
References
Auerbach, D. I., Staiger, D. O., & Buerhaus, P. I. (2018). Growing ranks of advanced practice clinicians — implications for the physician workforce. The New England Journal of Medicine, 378(25), 2358–2360. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp1801869
Broome, M. E., & Marshall, E. S. (2020). Transformational Leadership: Complexity, Change, and Strategic Planning. In Transformational Leadership in Nursing. Springer Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1891/9780826135056.0002
Bush, M. (2018). Addressing the root cause: Rising health care costs and social determinants of health. North Carolina Medical Journal, 79(1), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.18043/ncm.79.1.26
Norful, A. A., de Jacq, K., Carlino, R., & Poghosyan, L. (2018). Nurse practitioner–physician comanagement: A theoretical model to alleviate primary care strain. Annals of Family Medicine, 16(3), 250–256. https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.2230
Pereira, K. C., & Bowers, M. T. (2020). Current challenges in complex healthcare organizations and the quadruple aim. In Transformational Leadership in Nursing. Springer Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1891/9780826135056.0003
Vogenberg, F. R., & Santilli, J. (2018). Healthcare trends for 2018. American Health & Drug Benefits, 11(1), 48–54. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29692880
Part Three – Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
Training resources are one of the competing needs impacting high healthcare costs. According to Milken (2018), there is a need for professionally trained healthcare workers who cannot be available if there are no funds. Following this, there is a need to train more workers who are very efficient so that they can deliver quality work within a short time.
For training to be practical, competent experts must be consulted to retrain the workforce. The high costs of retraining the healthcare workers impact the increased healthcare costs. Another competing need that is highly affecting the cost of healthcare is technology.
Technology keeps advancing daily; hence it is essential to embrace it and ensure that all workers are well equipped to use it (Astier et al., 2020). However, technology is expensive, especially during the initial stages.
Relevant policy in the organization that may influence the selected healthcare issue
One of the relevant policies that may influence the cost of healthcare is ensuring all the employees have high skills. It is crucial to employ highly qualified workers who work under minimum conditions. Such workers ensure that the institutional goals are met and are willing to engage in more activities that lead to professional growth. The organization can have a policy whereby each employee undergoes an annual training session.
The healthcare leaders should organize the training. All the workers should attend the training sessions depending on their skills and professional level. This will ensure that the workers are aware of various changes in the healthcare sector and adapt to them.
As a result, it will be easy to deliver quality care to all patients without experiencing significant challenges. Besides, it will be easy to set long-term goals and have a clear strategy for achieving the objectives since the workers will collaborate to develop the relevant skills and knowledge.
Critique of the Policy
One of the ethical considerations that should be considered is equality. In this case, all the employees must be treated equally and given equal chances to grow professionally. According to Milken (2018), employees must be treated with respect despite their level, skills, and knowledge.
The major strength of this policy is that it will strengthen employer-employee relations, making it easy for organizational goals to be met. Besides, by enhancing workplace equality, it will be easy for the workers to work together and deal with various challenges (Milken, 2018).
However, one of the challenges that nursing leaders might face while implementing this policy is the lack of enough resources to train all the employees. In this case, some employees with more roles in the organization will be prioritized for the retraining sessions. This will make it hard for others to get relevant skills to help the company grow and achieve its goals.
Policy recommendation
There is a need to develop a stricter policy so that it becomes easy to implement technology and communicate with each other effectively. The privacy policy promises to address the competing needs of resources, patients, and workers while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the already existing policies.
The privacy policy will guide all workers, patients, and leaders on how and when to access various information (McGraw & Mandl, 2021). For example, the privacy policy states that it is wrong for a healthcare officer to provide patient information to third parties without the patient’s consent. If this happens, the healthcare provider should face disciplinary action that has already been set.
References
American Nursing Association. (2015). Code of Ethics PDF. https://www.nursingworld.org/coe-view-only
Astier, A., Carlet, J., Tichy, T. H., Jacklin, A., Jeanes, A., McManus, S., Pletz, M. W., Seifert, H., & Fitzpatrick, R. (2020). What is the Role of Technology in Improving Patient Safety? A French, German and UK Healthcare Professional Perspective. Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Management, 25(6). https://doi.org/10.1177/25160435209756
Kelly, P., & Porr, C. (2018). Ethical Nursing Care Versus Cost Containment: Considerations to Enhance RN Practice. The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol23No01Man06
McGraw, D., & Mandl, K. D. (2021). Privacy Protections to Encourage use of Health-Relevant Digital Data in a Learning Health System. NPJ Digital Medicine, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-020-00362-8
Milken, A. (2018). “Ethical Awareness: What It Is and Why It Matters. The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol23No01Man01
Healthcare Environment Paper Instructions
Assignment: Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue
The Quadruple Aim provides broad categories of goals to pursue to maintain and improve healthcare. Within each goal are many issues that, if addressed successfully, may have a positive impact on outcomes. For example, healthcare leaders are being tasked to shift from an emphasis on disease management often provided in an acute care setting to health promotion and disease prevention delivered in primary care settings. Efforts in this area can have significant positive impacts by reducing the need for primary healthcare and by reducing the stress on the healthcare system.
Changes in the industry only serve to stress what has always been true; namely, that the healthcare field has always faced significant challenges, and that goals to improve healthcare will always involve multiple stakeholders. This should not seem surprising given the circumstances. Indeed, when a growing population needs care, there are factors involved such as the demands of providing that care and the rising costs associated with healthcare. Generally, it is not surprising that the field of healthcare is an industry facing multifaceted issues that evolve over time.
In this module’s Discussion, you reviewed some healthcare issues/stressors and selected one for further review. For this Assignment, you will consider in more detail the healthcare issue/stressor you selected. You will also review research that addresses the issue/stressor and write a white paper to your organization’s leadership that addresses the issue/stressor you selected.
To Prepare:
• Review the national healthcare issues/stressors presented in the Resources and reflect on the national healthcare issue/stressor you selected for study.
• Reflect on the feedback you received from your colleagues on your Discussion post for the national healthcare issue/stressor you selected.
• Identify and review two additional scholarly resources (not included in the Resources for this module) that focus on change strategies implemented by healthcare organizations to address your selected national healthcare issue/stressor.
The Assignment (2-3 Pages):
Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue
Develop a 2 to 3 page paper, written to your organization’s leadership team, addressing your selected national healthcare issue/stressor and how it is impacting your work setting. Be sure to address the following:
• Describe the national healthcare issue/stressor you selected and its impact on your organization. Use organizational data to quantify the impact (if necessary, seek assistance from leadership or appropriate stakeholders in your organization).
Provide a brief summary of the two articles you reviewed from outside resources on the national healthcare issue/stressor. Explain how the healthcare issue/stressor is being addressed in other organizations