Medicaid healthcare program - Essay Example

Medicaid offers the healthcare services to more than 55 million Americans that include the elderly and the disabled (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007). In order to discuss how the program could be transformed or used at a general healthcare setup while managing along the obstacles like political controversies and stingy resource pool at the same time also, I conducted an interview with the healthcare manager and in charge of Medicaid service, Ms. Faith at the local hospital. Ms. Faith as a Medicaid service coordinator and health manager tries to maintain a balance between coordination of service plans and maintaining a patient-centered approach.

Some of the questions included in the interview are as follows: 1. How was the program restructured or reengineered to adapt to internal and external factors impacting it? 2. What internal and external factors were considered in the transformation? 3. What kinds of barriers or obstacles were encountered? 4. What is the potential impact on the program of technology, legislation, etc on the services provided on the program? Ms. Faith told that she experienced quite a lot in the process of restructuring the Medicaid health service to make it adaptable with certain internal and external factors like leadership, patient safety, and financial risks.

Threats to a healthcare organization come directly from the external and internal factors that can highly influence any desired change and managing them effectively is very important for any patient-centered approach to keep working smoothly in the long run. It was stressed by Ms. Faith that in order to stand up against the forces that try to suppress any good strategy like a patient-centered Medicaid service in a healthcare setup, the present healthcare executives and managers should be fully familiar with the risks brought up by the internal and external factors when they are not handled appropriately.

Medicaid is an internationally acknowledged service plan which not only lays a great emphasis on the patient needs but also leaves the organizations a freedom to apply it in any way that suits their needs which underlines the program’s interesting feature of high flexibility. Risk management in a healthcare organization is also emphasized by Medicaid and in order to ensure this aspect of the program is practiced at the hospital, Ms. Faith identified how good leadership can play a huge role in managing risk that comes from mismanaged patient needs and financial assets.

What with the global financial crisis having made the conditions all the more difficult already, the healthcare providers can face challenges in practicing a patient-centered approach as advised by Medicaid in addition to managing operational requirements, quality standards, and financial assets. Such challenges actually form threats that can keep the healthcare organizations from reaching the goal of providing quality care to the patients while observing the financial burdens also. So, such factors should be keenly observed and balance should be maintained between them so that any innovative or rebuilding strategy like Medicaid could work in a healthcare facility.

Such a structure should be designed by the healthcare executives in coordination with services like Medicaid that let the leadership “make more effective and timely decisions based on improved information and an enterprise-wide understanding of the impact”