Introduction
Health Care Management affects more than a billion people every day all around the world. Therefore, it is very important to understand how the health units function. The evaluation of the health units is based on mainly three factors-Efficiency, Effectiveness and Equity. A look at the efficiency of Hospital operations will bring to the front the factors that cause a Hospital to fail in providing proper care to its patients. Once the Hospital analyses where it is going wrong, it can adopt some best practices to improve upon its services.
Causal Factors for Health Care Management
Health Care Management is a highly competitive field, and the survival of a certain Health Care Institution depends on the factors of efficiency, quality and profitability. Most of these factors are interconnected with each other, and, therefore, one has to look at the holistic picture while evaluating Health Care services of a particular institution. The ultimate test is the patient and therefore the views of the patient should be of utmost importance. Using a patient’s feedback is critical for analysing and evaluating the Health Care services. Many will argue on this particular criterion of evaluation as the patient is unaware of the dynamics of the Hospital administration.
There are also performance dimensions in evaluating the efficacy of Hospital Administration (Brady et al, 2002). These can be both internal factors as well as external factors that finally lead to evaluating the performance in terms of economic and quality parameters. Internal factors could be the way in which hospital resources are being used in providing proper care to the patients. Also, the Hospital that has invested a lot in these resources will want it to be used efficiently so that they can justify the investment incurred. Next parameter is the quality of the service provided should meet all industry standards. The external factors could be the economic condition of the state (Yfantopoulos, 2003) and quality of life after the treatment. The administrator evaluates the economic condition of the Hospital through the number of health insurances bought, and quality of life will be measured by the administration through the feedback of the patient.
All health care providers have common goals i.e. to provide maximum quality health care with minimum investment. As spending becomes minimal, one is forced to adopt measures to assess the quality of health care extensively. The health care providers lie heavily on measurement systems so much so that the results provided improve the quality of services. The measurement systems should be highly deterministic in nature. The information technology structure should be highly efficient in pointing out the problem areas to the Health Care provider.
It has been seen in most Hospitals that people have forgotten the use of traditional means of providing health care (Dorr, 2005) that in some cases could be more efficient. Modern machines have mechanized health care to such an extent that health care providers increase the spending through blatant misuse of these machines. There has to be a mechanism that can control this and the result will be that the Hospital spending will reduce drastically. The health care providers should also be aware of the changes in trends and act accordingly. Infectious diseases are no longer the primary reason for the need for care among patients worldwide but now it has been the advent of chronic diseases. Therefore Health Care Administration should hasten to catch up and meet the needs of patients.
Conclusion
The efficiency, quality and cost are all causal factors for Hospital Administration. All these factors are embroiled with external factors for example recession. The Health care provider has to be highly deterministic in nature in evaluating the quality of the services provided so that the problem area can be removed, and unnecessary spending can be controlled by the Health Care Provider.
References
Brady M., Cronin J., Brand R. (2002). Performance-only measurement of service quality:a
replication and extension. Journal of BusinessResearch; 55: 17-3
Dorr, D.A., A. Wilcox, S.M. Donnelly, L. Burns, and P.D. Clayton. 2005. Impact of
generalist care managers on patients with diabetes. Health Services Research 4
(5 Pt 1): 1400–1421.
Yfantopoulos, I. (2003). Health Economics. Theory and Policy. Athens; se? . 83-88
