Healthcare Organization Analysis

Healthcare Organization Analysis

Introduction

Managed care Children Miracle Networks are one of the central approaches to health care delivery in the United States. This approach has important connotations for the confidentiality of patients'' medical records; specifically, close inspection suggests an inherent paradox concerning the maintenance of patient confidentiality in the age of complex managed care arrangements. Although these systems are designed to provide cheaper, quality care for patients and proficient efficiency for health care providers, they concurrently compromise privacy by making patients'' confidential records available to a wide range of internal and external audiences.

Managed care is a wide-ranging, and often puzzling, term that refers to a many-sided and incessantly evolving system designed to provide quality health care and simultaneously contain costs (Finn 2000). Management and control of spending are maintained by closely monitoring how physicians and other medical professionals care for patients; techniques include not allowing procedures to be performed, refusing physicians'' permission to discuss alternative procedures, limiting coverage to care by preferred primary care physicians and hospitals, and requiring preauthorization for specialty care (Bergthold 2000).

Strategic Planning In Health Care Organizations

The most critical problem area facing hospital administrators today is associated with business and financial management, particularly the need to control expenses and conserve resources. However, issues labeled as "business and financial problems" were identified as among the most problematic areas in studies conducted in 1961 (Ginter Richardson and Swayne 2001). It would appear that issues of management effectiveness and organizational performance have been considered problems for the last thirty years in health care administration. However, the "business and financial problems" facing health care administrators today are very different from the types of issues confronting health service organizations twenty or thirty years ago.

Currently, the health care industry is in the midst of a structural revolution that is reshaping the financing and delivery of health services, driven largely by a shift in market power to external constituencies such as government agencies and large businesses. Thus, the emphasis on business skills is now centered on external surveillance and internal efficiency assessment along with strategy formation and planning. This trend is in contrast to the "business and financial problems" entailing revenue enhancement and domain expansion which were common in the 1960s and 1970s.

Even though external surveillance and internal assessment issues are becoming the predominant concern of health care administrators, the management tools utilized by these professionals have not kept pace. For instance, less than half of the hospitals currently using strategic planning conduct any form of environmental analysis, fewer than one in five do general consumer surveys, and only 27 percent include budget and resource allocation processes in their strategic planning practices.

The failure to incorporate resource allocation processes into strategic planning may result from the focus on revenue enhancement and market forces during the last ten years. Future strategic planning methods and models used by hospitals must incorporate resource deployment models which conserve resources, eliminate duplication of services and equipment within departments, and allow for effective cost ...