Bundled Care: Pros and Cons for Different Stakeholders - Essay Example

Bundled Care: Pros and Cons for Different StakeholdersI found the source from The Wall Street Journal online. Melinda Beck reports about the advantages and disadvantages of bundled care for different stakeholders in the article, “Hospitals Push Bundled Care as the Billing Plan of the Future.” She states that bundled care simplifies hospital bills and payments, reduces health care costs for patients, and encourages doctors and hospitals to decrease operational costs by promoting better service coordination and communication efforts.

The disadvantages of bundled care are that the hospitals will absorb the extra expenses that go beyond the bundled price, and that they will have to cope with the administrational challenges of integrating care.The elements of strategic management that are included in the article are branding, pricing, and promotion, and they are related to the subject of the article because bundled care can improve branding, pricing, and promotion strategies and activities. First, bundled care can make branding easier because one bundle can include all point-of-service activities.

This makes it easier for patients to compare hospitals as brands through the bundled care options they offer. Second, pricing is related to the article because bundled care eliminates the practice of itemizing costs. For instance, bundled care offers one price, such as the bundled cost for knee replacement. Bundled cost simplifies the pricing process for patients, but it underlines the demand for more efficient and coordinated health care services from hospital staff and doctors. Third, bundled care is a good promotional tactic because it is a pre-service activity that sells a combined set of point-of-activity services.

The simplicity and cost-savings can attract more patients to hospitals that offer competitive bundled care.The article appears to encourage more hospitals and insurance companies to offer and cover bundled care, respectively. The tone of its writing and content emphasize the pros of bundled care to the health care system as a whole because it can reduce costs through possibly eliminating inefficiencies. It also highlights that it is customer-centered because it wants to improve patients’ lives through giving low-cost options and low-stress pricing schemes.

Moreover, the article argues that doctors and hospitals will also benefit from bundled care, if they have an integrated, teamwork-based, scientific approach to measuring services and costs. Bundled care can be expensive for hospitals who are not dedicated to streamlining and measuring services and removing bottlenecks and redundancies. This article will help me succeed in this class because it shows how pre-service activities that are marketing-based are connected to new point-of-service innovations.

I have become more familiar with how pre-service marketing strategies entail creativity in developing new point-of-service approaches. Marketing can induce greater quality of operations and clinical process innovations if it holds hospitals accountable for its promoted bundled care packages. Furthermore, the article will help me in my employment because I am now aware of marketing and point-of-service connections that will help me improve my marketing competencies. Hospitals should tap marketing concepts and strategies in improving, not only their marketing tools, but, more importantly, their health care delivery systems.

Marketing competencies are essential to hospital managers because it can improve their empirical and customer-centeredness approach to their services, and it can also enhance the quality of health care services and the bottom line altogether by introducing analytic measures and relevant marketing principles and tools. Work CitedBeck, Melinda. “Hospitals Push Bundled Care as the Billing Plan of the Future.” The Wall Street Journal, 8 June 2014. Web. 7 Oct. 2014. .