Week 6
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Week 6 - Assignment: Create an Issues Brief for the Board
Instructions
The outcome from your executive-level meeting with your leadership team, the top three
issues, and strategies to address the issues have been identified. It is now time to inform
your board of trustees of your decisions and recommendations using the Issue Brief format.
An Issue Brief is a concise method to define the issue, list the recommendations, and identify
how the issue impacts on the organization. Briefs may be titled differently depending on the
intended audience (e.g., Issue Brief, Policy Brief, or Health Brief). Wong, Green, Bazemore,
and Miller (2017) provide examples of various briefs.
The Commonwealth Fund provides Issue Briefs on the analysis and recommendations for
current healthcare trends. The Issue Brief example provided pertains to the impact the
Affordable Care Act has on small businesses. As you prepare to complete your assignment,
look at the issue brief example provided by Arensmeyer and Chase (2018) found in your
resources for this week. In addition, Sarnak, Squires, Kuzmak, & Bishop (2017) provides
commentary on an Issue Brief on prescriptions.
References
Arensmeyer, J., & Chase, D. (2018). The affordable care act’s impact on small business. The
Commonwealth Fund Issue Brief.
Butler, M. (2017). Money troubles: Changing reimbursement models shake up physician and
outpatient healthcare industry. Journal of AHIMA, 88(9), 14-17.
Sarnak, D. O., Squires, D., Kuzmak, G., & Bishop, S. (2017). Paying for prescriptions around
the world: Why is the U. S. an outlier? The Commonwealth Fund Issue Brief.
The Commonwealth Fund. (n.d.). About this site.
Wong, S. L., Green, L. A., Bazemore, A. W., & Miller, B. F. (2017). How to write a health policy brief. Families, Systems, & Health, 35(1), 21–24.
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For this assignment, you will create three Issue Briefs, one for each of your top three issues—
with the financial challenges being the number one issue. An example of a completed Issue
Brief on Technological Advances and Social Media is shown below. If one of your top three
issues is also technological advances, be sure to select a different subtopic than social media.
Instructions to complete the Issue Briefs are found within the <-> symbols. The instructions
are there to guide you and should be deleted before submission of your assignment. You will
create the Issue Brief using tables in a Word document.
Length: Your 3 Issue Briefs, one each for the top three issues will be a minimum of 2 pages
each in length.
Resource: A minimum of 2 scholarly references for each Issue Brief are required for this
assignment.
Upload your document and click the Submit to Dropbox button.
Table 6. Issue Brief Example
<Hospital Fictitious Name>
ISSUE BRIEF #1—Technological Advances
Prepared by <insert your name & title here>
Date <insert date submitted here>
Introduction
<Provide a brief introduction of what led to the selection of this issue.>
Ex.: Under the auspices of our Chief Information Officer, a number of issues and trends were identified by our research staff and were presented to our senior leadership team to review, prioritize, and select the top three issues to become part of our strategic plan.
Issue
<State the issue and briefly state why this
issue is important to your organization and
Ex.: Technological advances—Social media platforms offer patients a venue to publicize their level of satisfaction with our hospital.
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y g the relevance of the issue to your intended audience.> Recommendation
<State the action you seek relating to the above-stated issue. The recommendation may indicate the continuation, elimination, or amending of the issue.>
Ex.: Closely monitor the hospital’s social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) to assess the number and quality of responses to hospital services. To accomplish this recommendation, we will recruit and hire a social media expert to join our public relations department.
Background
<Provide supporting information relevant to the issue and recommendation:
List the actions you employ or activities in which you engage in that demonstrate the importance of that issue to you;
List the current evidence-base that supports your actions or activities or
suggests that these actions or
Ex.: Increasing numbers of patients use social media to seek information regarding the quality of care delivered at any given hospital. The use of Healthgrades, an online resource, provides comprehensive information about physicians, hospitals and healthcare providers and enables prospective patients to compare and select a physician or hospital based on the “grade” found on the website.
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Submissions
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activities lead to a given outcome.>
References/Resources
<List the appropriate citations for the evidence you provide within the issue brief- a minimum 3 required.>
Ex.: Vogenberg, R., & Santilli, J. (2018). Healthcare trends for 2018. American Health & Drug Benefits, 11(1), 48-54. http://proxy1.ncu.edu/login? url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=ccm&AN=128026730&site=eds- live
Contact Information
<List the individuals the recipient of the Issue Brief may contact for more information about the issue.>
Ex.: Mr. John Doe, Chief Information Officer, Lead Contact, 555.555.5555 mobile.