Policy Proposal

Running head: Dashboard Benchmark Evaluation of ABC Hospital 1

Dashboard Benchmark Evaluation of ABC Hospital 5

Dashboard Benchmark Evaluation of ABC Hospital

Danielle Ferrante

Capella University

Health Care Law and Policy

November 2019

Dashboard Benchmark Evaluation of ABC Hospital

For eleven years ABC Hospital has been operating on 300,300 square feet of land. Since the population largely served by the hospital comes from struggling economic background, the hospital on a day serves an average of 300 patients both in and outpatient (Dowding et al. 2015). Due to this relatively large number of patients served the hospital is also vast in infrastructural design so that it can accommodate the large numbers of patients streaming in everyday for treatment. The hospital has a bed capacity of 320 which was based on the assumptions that if the highest number of patients ever admitted on a day all are inpatient then the beds will be enough. Although this number beds have been insufficient due to influx of patients in the recent five years. Also given the nature of hospital’s specialization which is diagnosing and treatment of cancer related diseases, many patients have been streaming in as cancer cases keep rising. Moreover, the hospital is situated in a lower economically motivated neighborhood who majority are struggling to meet their basic needs.

From analysis the hospital nurses are overstretched and also the beds in the hospital in most scenarios aren’t enough to meet the demand by patients making about 75% of patients served monthly forced to share beds especially in the maternity ward. According to the World Health Organization and the federal government benchmark any hospital should have a 1:5 ratio for nurse to patient however this hasn’t been the case in the hospital due to understaffing (Dowding et al. 2015). And this has seen the nurse patient ratio go to 1:85 compromising on the quality of healthcare given by those nurses.

Another issue is the high cost of healthcare offered in the hospital which has left many people unable to afford basic healthcare since they are not economically empowered to afford certain medical procedures for instance surgeries and even high-tech operations. But according to the federal statues all hospitals which are states funded are required by law to subsidize their charges so as to all every citizen to be able to access healthcare. Actually, according to the UN sustainable development goals every citizen is entitled to basic healthcare from the state. Although some of the main causes of high cost of healthcare in the hospital is due to outsourcing for qualified health professionals as the hospitals has very few literate health officials due to low literacy or education level of majority of the people from the community.

Staffing is an area which the hospital has the potential to make a major break-through, as understaffing is currently a major benchmark set back. This is because according to the WHO 2017 report on the quality of medical care in the United States in comparison to middle east countries ravaged with civil war, enough staffing plays a critical role in the quality of healthcare a patient can receive in a hospital (Gabel et al. 2017). Moreover the report went ahead to say that the smaller the nurse to patient ratio is the better the quality of healthcare provided as the nurse will have more time to adequately serve the patient accordingly as compared when the ratio is too high that the nurse has to hurry doing certain procedures incorrectly in order to attend to other patient in waiting. This leads to underperformance of fundamental benchmarks set by both federal state and health organizations like World Health Organization (WHO).

According to the WHO in an event certain benchmark underperformance like the case of understaffing, ethical consideration stipulated in the ethical and legislative component of healthcare field states that a medical officer should at all-time deliver the best healthcare service possible without compromising due to issue like overcrowding and other factors. Also, another ethical consideration in regards to benchmark underperformance includes the issue of healthcare affordability (Portela et al. 2016). According to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) all state own and even private hospital are required by law to subsidize their medical services so that the poor individual in the society can also afford. This will reduce the healthcare disparity in the community where few people can pay for top quality healthcare services while other people are dying due to lack of basic healthcare services.

In summary, the benchmark evaluation analysis in ABC hospital revealed some lapses especially in implementation of some of the benchmarks which have been laid down by federal states and major medical institutions relating to health. Some of these lapses are in provision of quality healthcare services as 52% of the nurse in the hospital from evaluation are overstretched making them offer substandard services which can be seen from the readmission cases in the hospital which has increased by 15% in the past two years. These problems or challenges can however be solved through ethical consideration and strict implementation and follow policy on medical or healthcare service provision by healthcare centers.

References

Dowding, D., Randell, R., Gardner, P., Fitzpatrick, G., Dykes, P., Favela, J., & Currie, L. (2015). Dashboards for improving patient care: review of the literature. International journal of medical informatics, 84(2), 87-100.

Gabel, F., O’hanlon, K., Brankin, P., Bryce, R., Trescher, A. L., Haux, C., & Listl, S. (2017). Linkage of health care claims data and apps data: The ADVOCATE oral health care dashboard. International Journal of Population Data Science, 1(1).

Portela, M. C. A. S., Camanho, A. S., Almeida, D. Q., Lopes, L., Silva, S. N., & Castro, R. (2016). Benchmarking hospitals through a web-based platform. Benchmarking: An International Journal, 23(3), 722-739.