- In today’s health care environment is it better to approach the future with a compass or a map? Explain and defend your choice.
Maintaining one’s health should be both affirmative and exact. It is always necessary to know the things that should be dealt with prior to making decisions and actions. Health care had greatly evolved for the past decades and individuals seeking for health care assistance must know these differences. The advent of globalization and the innovational breakthroughs had pushed many health care providers to make maximum offers to the customers. To be able to know what the techniques they do are, one must have to know the difference between a compass and a map. In this case, a compass and maps are two ideas very different from your map and compass dictionary meaning. The needlepoint of the compass always point to the north, but if putting a magnet near to it will alter directions. Basically, a compass is like your conscience. A map can be used in various ways, secure proper trails to reach the target. Furthermore, a map provides several preferences on which way to go in order to get into the target area. In this modern day environment, we must approach the future of health care with a compass. A map is useless without knowing the direction, but in anyways as long as proper conscience in business prevails, the compass would drive you and bring you to the desired actions and improvements necessary in health care services without moral degradation (Supplynation.org.au, N.D.).
- There is a growing trend of HCOs getting bigger through mergers, acquisitions, or strategic alliances. Some say the days of the mid-sized locally controlled community hospital are numbered. Is this trend toward bigger health systems better for local health care or worse? Explain and defend your choice.
The trend toward bigger health systems does have both advantages and disadvantages. By definition, acquisition means sharing of technologies as well as health care providers, physician, and surgeons. This means that a certain health care organization has the inability to provide the latest health care equipment. With the help of the unions and acquisitions, certain organizations were able to provide more efficient services to the patients. A merge or allied health organization could provide less-expensive medical care. It can promote affordable preventive medicines due to a lot of key players tending to the needs of the community. Moreover, having allies and being able to acquire to the bigger company could mean greater financial support for the health care organization, and then if the health care organization is locally established, patients will not need to go to farther places for an effective health treatment. On the other hand, having more allies could also be difficult to manage. Adapting to the new set of rules as well as management teams, management roles, shift in the levels of operating roles and, etc. could be a lot to work. The management would be able to intently impose very strict yet flexible guidelines to the staffs and other officers of the organization (Houle and Fleece, 2012).
- Review the “Introductory Incident” on page 345 of the text (at the start of chapter 9). Is this trend discussed of insurance companies acquiring physician practices a positive or negative development? Explain and defend your choice.
The introductory incident encompasses an example of positive and profitable development. In order for insurance companies to realize profitability, it would be helpful to employ a certain physician to treat insured patients. This approach would enable the insurance company to charge less payment from the patients. Despite less payment, patients do still have more options as compared to the average patients. In addition, is that when an insurance company acquires physician practices, it means that the company could gain control over the doctors. However, despite these positive facts I believe that this is a negative development. One of the things that an insurance company must focus is to deliver satisfaction to the insured person and comply with the needs of that person. It is the right of the insured person to choose his or her own doctor as well as it is the right of the insured person to be provided with a health maintenance care with comfort, ability, and ease (Austin and Hungerford, 2009).
- Information technology has become a significant factor in the health care environment. Based on your experience react to the following statement, “the electronic health record has been an important component in improving patient safety and operational efficiency.”
The statement is true in so many ways. First, electronic health record is very readable, organized, and easy to access. Most of hospital accidents and death are due to negligence and error in the inputting of data in the health record. With an electronic health record at hand, physicians would find at ease finding and assessing the patients’ needs and correct whatever unfitting entry in the data. Having an electronic data is also very easy to find than most hardcopies patient’s health records. For certain queries like past ailments, birth records, for lawsuits purposes, and other valuable information can be access much faster. When used in a proper manner, an electronic heath record could relieve a great deal of frustration associated by the repetitive task that is done in the traditional data gathering. This could also free up several technical of errors or at least make error checking easier. However, the most readily disadvantage of having an electronic health record is that it could be easily altered in a way that it could be damaging to a person’s health assessment. These alterations could also be very fatal (Sacconi, 2007).
References
Austin , D. A., & Hungerford , T. L. (2009). The market structure of the health insurance industry. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40834.pdf
Houle, D., & Fleece, J. (202, March 14). Why one-third of hospitals will close by 2020. Retrieved February 1, 2014, from http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/03/onethird-hospitals-close-2020.html
Sacconi, L. (2007). A social contract account for CSR as an extended model of corporate governance (II): Compliance, reputation and reciprocity. Journal of Business Ethics, 75(1), 77-96.
Supplynation.org.au (n.d.). Case study: Compass group and Corporate connect Lab. Retrieved January 31, 2014, from http://supplynation.org.au/resources/Case_Study_Compass_Group_Corporate_Connect_AB
