Health Care.
Executive summary
Due to bed shortage, leaders in the health industry are devising new methods such as introducing a home program to treat patients that would have otherwise be hospitalized. Presbyterian Healthcare introduced a home program that was developed by Johns Hopkins Hospital. The program aims to improve patient outcomes, increase patient satisfaction, and cut down on costs. Patients who qualify for this program have to meet a certain criterion such as suffering from chronic heart failure, or stable pulmonary embolism and living close enough to the Albuquerque hospitals. Through the care model adopted, quality measurement, and the pay model, the hospital has managed to meet the objectives of the home program, which is to cut down costs and improve patient outcomes and, at the same time, solve bed shortage problem.
Key issues
The issue of bed shortage is a common problem in hospitals. Presbyterian healthcare services (PHS) is a group of eight hospitals that provides care for over 750,000 patients in Mexico. It introduced the Johns Hopkins-developed program, which intended to allow professionals to provide patients with individual care with a reduction in health costs. The program seeks to provide better health outcomes mostly for the users of the Hospital at Home program. The program also helps the hospitals address their shortage in hospital beds as patients presenting at the emergency room with chronic illnesses can be treated at home instead of being hospitalized.
Situational analysis
The program’s strength is that it provides Medicaid and Medicare products. It has been developed and tested for efficiency by John Hopkins hospital. It will reduce costs, improve care as well as solve the problem of a bed shortage. With the home program, the organization has an opportunity to attend to many patients who appear in the emergency rooms without having to hospitalize them. The issue of re-admission also increases costs, which can be eliminated through the program. The program’s weakness is that employee incompetency to provide home-based care. The organization is forces to hire and train workers to work within the new model. The program faces the threat of patient resistance because patients might feel that they are safer when admitted than when being treated at home.
Strategy formulation
The chosen strategic alternative has to be looked at collectively to ensure its consistency and relevance. Often a single strategy might not be the most effective, meaning bringing several alternatives might be conducive. Hence, after an analysis of the situation, the Hospital at Home care uses the validated medical eligibility criteria to ensure the safety of the patient. The hospital should also ensure that patients understand the care model being used to build on patient trust. The criteria to determine the patient’s eligibility to fit into the program should be followed to the letter because the compromise of the criterion may endanger the patient’s life.
Physicians should also visit every patient daily for medical care or care plan coordination. Monitoring is important to eliminate the chances of failure. If possible, the organization should invest in the patient care technology in which physicians can monitor patient’s conditions even in a different location. Patients and their families should also be educated on how to manage the medical condition and when to notify the doctor.
Hospital at home program requires qualified practitioners who can work at a home set up. This also for hospitals to hire and train new employees to handle patients at home. This also calls for the organization to come up with new policies and standards as well as ethical codes that will guide the workers into working within the new approach. It also calls for complementary benefits for the workers to encourage and motivate them into working in the new environments faced with new challenges that they were not used to.
Recommendation
For the efficiency of the Hospital at Home care program, this program should conduct awareness campaigns to curb the problem of the incorrect assumption that hospital care is the only safest care (Ticona & Schulman, 2016). This will assist in increasing its implementation on a wide scale. The program should also have payment codes to give patients ample time during payment. Most importantly, sensitizing how the Hospital at Home program offers the best patient centers care at lower costs would increase the trust people have in the program (Ticona & Schulman, 2016).
Implementation strategies
Even after the success realized through the Hospital at Home program, it has been quite hard to implement the program on a wide scale. This is because there are various incorrect assumptions that hospital care, compared to individualized care, is safer (Gorski, 2016). Patients also have uncertainties with the payment of Medicare. As a result of this, the Hospital at Home care needs to work on improving the fee-for-service Medicare to remove the growing doubts on the program. This will aid in the implementation of the introduced model by helping it go beyond just the Medicare managed care health systems.
Benchmarks for success and contingency plans
After these implementations, Hospital at Home program needs to have frequent interactions with their patients to determine if they are satisfied with the program. Higher Satisfaction scores are an indication that the program is on the right track. Checking for areas that need improvement, such as the payment method, would also play a role in the success of the program. This program should work on having contingency plans, which are alternative plans if at all things do not end up going as planned to avoid any chance of lagging in performance. A well-defined structure of the hospital policies and contingency plans should be availed to the employees for better health outcomes.
References
Foubister, V. (2011). Hospital at home program in New Mexico improves care quality and patient satisfaction while reducing costs.
Ginter, P. M., Duncan, W. J., & Swayne, L. E. (2018). The strategic management of health care organizations. John Wiley & Sons.
Gorski, L. A. (2016). Implementing home health standards in clinical practice. Home healthcare now, 34(2), 76-85.
Ticona, L., & Schulman, K. A. (2016). Extreme home makeover – the role of intensive home health care. The New England Journal of Medicine, 375(18), 1707.