Week 3 Project/ Clinical Performance Excellence

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MHA5020-Healthcare Organizations WEEK 3 LECTURE

Clinical Performance Excellence

It has long been said that the American healthcare delivery system is in need of fundamental change. As a result, strategies have been identified by raising the awareness of the general public and key stakeholders of quality concerns.

The vision of the Institute of Medicines that six dimensions rely heavily on the ability of healthcare organizations to identify forces that encourage or impede efforts to improve quality, develop strategies for fostering greater accountability for quality, and identify important areas of research should be pursued to facilitate improvements in quality.

The Institute of Medicine reports on healthcare quality by making recommendations that in order to improve health care quality healthcare should be safe, effective, patient centered, timely, efficient and equitable.

The foundation of clinical performance protocols should aim for clinical excellence by focusing on clinical care guidelines, training, continuous improvement plans, and clinical benchmarks and dashboards that are supported by best practices and evidence-based practices.

Hospital leaders may be encouraged to build a framework that enables the organization to deliver heath service in response to community and patient needs by integrating services among many groups while recommending and providing adequate numbers of competent persons to provide care. The performance excellence initiative of healthcare organizations should make it clear that patient safety and the redesign of healthcare delivery is part of a larger picture dealing with the entire terrain of concerns about health care quality.

Additional Materials

From your course textbook, The Well-Managed Healthcare Organization, read the following chapter:

· Foundations of Clinical Performance

From the South University Online Library, read the following article:

· A User’s Manual for the IOM’s ‘Quality Chasm’ Report 

Impact of a Pay for Performance System

Pay for performance strategies focus on the concept of standardization. Pay for performance emphasize on the reduction of variation, in particular health care behaviors while providing a motive for reward in profession performance. However, pay for performance ignore and even downplay the variation between individual patients.

Strategies for standardization and the reduction of health care variation attempt to set a baseline of outcomes and target for providers to maximize patient engagement and improve quality. The concern with this strategy is that there is no one size that fits all health care formulas. Individual patients require and even expect individual care. The challenge in pay for performance is balancing a system with what the patient feels they are entitled to, regardless of individual behaviors.

There is an important aspect to pay for performance which focuses on what patients perceive as quality care. The patient satisfaction and awareness of a quality survey is an interesting discussion. Patients feel that the interpersonal relationship they have with the provider is an important aspect in health care. Too often, patients do not understand the technical requirement of quality care. In addition, patients may not even know where to look to find those outcomes. However, patients can relate to the interpersonal relationship of the physician or hospital staff.

In the pay for performance structure, it is crucial for the provider’s ability to establish an identification of excellence. The impact of pay for performance on providers is built on the premise of adhering to clinical guidelines while accommodating the customers need for time, communication and comfort.

Additional Materials

From your course textbook, The Well-Managed Healthcare Organization, read the following chapter:

· The Clinical Staff Organization

From the South University Online Library, read the following article:

· Patient-Centered Pay for Performance: Are We Missing the Target? 

Horizontal Thinking

The clinical support system of a healthcare organization provides core contributions to services that adds value to the customer. The horizontal thinking within a healthcare organization creates an environment that is:

· Patient centered—Priority is Value.

· Highly reliable—Do the right thing.

· Efficient—The best possible way.

· Quality Driven—Excellence.

· Satisfaction—Patient and Staff.

Health systems are made up of a vertical system of general services, providing prevention and care for prevailing health problems, and of specific health conditions working in silos of individual departments. However, many times there is a need of collaboration of healthcare services through communication transitions of patient information, test results, diagnostics, acute care, and prevention programs. In the Horizontal system of general services, components are more integrated. The intervention of the health care delivery system, therefore, constitutes the vertical–horizontal interface linking the healthcare workforce constraints of system. A constructive collaboration between clinical support services is urgent, because the delivery of interventions requires by far the largest portion of the health care services that supports patient needs in fulfilling a target state of a safe, effective, patient centered, timely, efficient and equitable health care delivery system.

Creating a value stream is an essential tool utilized to map the current state for analyzing and designing an ideal state for services from its beginning to end through the perception of value to the customer. The value stream map helps a healthcare organization see constraints in the delivery of health care services. In addition, it shows the linkage and flow of valuable information and essential services, as well as providing a measurement of efficiency and quality outcome. In order to achieve a well-managed healthcare organization of excellence, it is critical to align clinical support service and create an environment of continuous improvement.

Additional Materials

From your course textbook, The Well-Managed Healthcare Organization, read the following chapter:

· Clinical Support Services

From the Internet, read the following article:

Integrated Health Care. Essential Hospitals Institutes. Retrieved from http://essentialhospitals.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Integrated-Health-Care-Literature-Review-Webpost-8-22-13-CB.pdf