Different Perspectives in Regards to Delivering High Quality Care - Essay Example

Different Perspectives in Regards to Delivering High Quality Care There are various types of professionals who are involved in the provision of health care services. As much as they all work with the aim of providing health care services to the public, their specific contribution to the process is always very different. Different health professionals usually specialize in specific fields in healthcare provision. In most occasions people tend to assume that physicians are all they need to have their health problems fixed at the hospital. They fail to realize that there are nurses, Health Information Management Executive, and administrators. This paper aims at discussing the different perspectives in regards to delivering high quality care and the contribution of the various professionals in the healthcare provider industry. This paper is based on information that was collected through interviewing healthcare professionals with different specialties. The health care professionals that were interviewed included: a primary care physician; a specialist physician; a nurse, who can either be an acute a long term care nurse; an administrator, and a health information management executive. The questions that were supposed to be asked during the interview include: the number of years of experience that the interviewee have; details of their work experience; type and size of their specialties; a description of the services that they offer; the population they serve along with details on gender, age, financial class, and race; what they feel is the major obstacle to the delivery of quality healthcare; what specific issue they have with the population they serve; how they feel about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and how will it impact their scope of service; How they feel about the HITECH Act and are they implementing Meaningful Use Criteria in order to obtain the stimulus funding; and How they feel about Accountable Care Organizations. The health institution for which the interviewees involved in this study works for is Morristown Medical Center. Morristown Medical Center is a hospital under Atlantic Health System that is based in New Jersey. The hospital has an admission capacity of 649 beds for general medical and surgical patients. The hospital is estimated to make almost 35000 admissions annually. The hospital also performs about 12450 inpatient and 15000 outpatient surgeries annually. Its emergency room has more than 80000 visits annually. Morristown Medical Center offer services such as cancer treatment, Nephrology, Diabetes & Endocrinology, Gastroenterology & GI Surgery, Orthopedics, Urology, Pulmonology, Neurology & Neurosurgery, Psychiatry, rehabilitation, Cardiology & Heart Surgery, Geriatrics , Gynecology, Ear, Nose & Throat treatment. Most of their clients are individuals in between the age of 35 and 25 with very minimal financial capability. The first interviewee was a primary care physician, with the experience of nine years of offering healthcare services to the public. After completion of the medical school program, the interviewee proceeded to post graduate training where he took a program in pediatric medicine. In his nine years of healthcare he had worked in a mission hospital in Africa for the first two years of his career. He later moved to the United States of America where he works for Atlantic Health System. He has worked for Atlantic Health System for the last 7 years. He has worked for various hospitals that are part of this system. At the moment he is based at Morristown Medical Center in Morristown. As a primary care physician he always have the responsibility of being the first medical practitioner who patients see. In his case he mainly deal with the diagnosis and treatment of children. In his opinion, there are a number of factors that negatively affect the provision of quality health care. He attributes such problems to lack of health education to the public and lack of community awareness of these health factors make the public reluctant on health related issues. In his opinion, he thinks that Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will be of high benefits to the healthcare sectors in the country because it will enable all citizens to access health insurance without discrimination of their financial capability. In relation to the HITECH Act, he believes that it can help allot in keeping and retrieval of patients’ details for the sake of follow up. At the hospital, they are using an e-health system and have been highly beneficial in improving their efficiency, especially when it comes to retrieval of patient records. The interviewee revealed that he is a member of an Accountable Care Organizations, American Medical Group Association (Bard and Nugent 113). The second interviewee was a cardiologist who was in service for the last fifteen years. Apart from Morristown Medical Center, the interviewee had worked for 4 health institutions from different states in the US. In the opinion of this interviewee, the main obstacles of quality health care provisions are the challenge of balancing between quality and affordability. Given that the hospital is a non-profitable organization, it is sometimes tricky when it comes to offering health care services that naturally costly. Such services include organ transplant. As a cardiologist, the main specialization of this interviewee at is diagnosing and treating heart and blood vessel diseases. The interviewee also claims that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will be of high benefit to patients as it will enable them to access insurance cover that will allow them to get medical attention at all times (Tate 101). The interviewee also believes in the effectiveness of the HITECH Act in improving healthcare services. Their institute has used e-health to reduce the time that is required for processing patient information. This makes it easier for him as a cardiologist to get a patient’s health history. This interviewee also happens to be a member of the same Accountable Care Organization as the first one, American Medical Group Association. The third interviewee was a long term service nurse at the same health institution. Her nursing career started about three years ago, and this is the only health institution that she had ever worked for professionally. In her opinion, the most common obstacle to the provision of quality health care services is the shortage of healthcare professionals. This is a problem that is faced by healthcare sectors globally. With regard to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, she is convinced that is the only way to make sure that everyone in the United States of America gets access to medical services regardless of their financial status. This is particularly true given the fact that they mostly attend to middle class citizen at this healthcare facility. She is also of the opinion that by adopting e-health the institution will be able to be more effective in service delivery. For a person in the nursing profession, the successful implementation of the HITECH Act will mean that they will not have to struggle digging out patients’ information from hard copy records. Instead, they will be able to access such information from various parts of the hospital (Wager Lee and Glaser 117). This will makes their work far much easier than it was before. It will also enable them to attend to many patients in a short period of time, given that there is already a notable shortage of nurses in the country. However, her main worry is that completely digitalizing the hospital’s information system can result in a situation where the hospital will not be able to function in the absence of their information system. She suggests that traditional ways of keeping such information would be more reliable because they do not depend on factors such as electric power and internet connectivity. This interviewee, however, claims that she is not a member of any Accountable Care Organization (ACO). Nevertheless, she still plans on joining one of these organizations. She is still not yet decided on which one of these organizations she will be joining. This will highly be dependent on which of the available organizations will serve her interests best. The organization that she is most interested in is the American Nurses Association. The fourth interviewee was a Director of Morristown Medical Center. Most of the functions that he performs at the institution are administrative ones. He started his career as a primary physician before he went and advanced by training as an administrator. He has been in the healthcare sector for the last twenty five years of his life. He once worked for Universal Health Services as a primary physician. For his career as a health institution administrator, he has worked for a total of three healthcare institutions. These institutions include Scripps Health, Baptist Health South Florida, and CHG Healthcare services. In all the three institutions he had served as an administrator. In the opinion of this interviewee, the most common challenge to the provision of quality health care is the lack of or limited prospects in career advancement. This is further intensified by the shortage of healthcare professionals in the United States of America and globally (Baker 77). At Morristown Medical Center, a shortage of healthcare professional is one of their greatest fears. According to this interviewee, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are one of the most important developments to ever happen in the healthcare sector in the United States of America. This is because it will make health care services available and affordable to all the citizens of the United States of America. This will mean that the Morristown Medical Center, being a not-for-profit healthcare organization will be able to offer its services to the community around and the whole country without the fear of their services not being affordable to the less fortunate. As the director at the Morristown Medical Center, he is very delighted of the implementation of the HITECH act at their institution. This is because it has reduced the possibilities of there being accidents arising from human error during information recording and retrieval (Hall 134). This enables them to offer more satisfactory services to the patients who visit their facilities. However, the problem with e-health is that putting up such a system is costly and time consuming. This means that they will have to part ways with both financial and chronological resources. This interviewee, however, does not belong to any Accountable Care Organization. He claims that he has not yet given that idea serious thoughts. The final interviewee was a Health Information Management. This interviewee was in this line of work for the last seven years. He started off as an information manager at DaVita Healthcare partner. Three years ago, he got an employment chance at a Morristown Medical Center as a junior information manager and rose to the post the he currently holds. In his opinion the greatest challenge to the provision of quality health care services is lack of feedback from most of their patients. With feedback, the institution is likely to be aware of the things that their patients think that should be done better. This result in the situation where the institution keeps doing thing the same way, despite patients being unsatisfied with such services. They have a mechanism to tackle this problem, but it seems like it is not that effective. The interviewee thinks that the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will bring allot of positive changes to the way healthcare services are handled in the United States of America. Both citizens and healthcare service provider will have an easy time in hospitals. This is because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will enhance easy access of patients’ personal and insurance information. He also feels that the HITECH Act will help the healthcare institution make the treatment process less tiresome. This is because it allows easy access, medication, and saving of patients’ important details. However, the problem comes with the transition from traditional methods of information keeping and retrieval. This is interviewee was not a member of any Accountable Care Organization. It is clearly evident that different health care professionals have different perspectives on the challenges that are facing the provision of health care. This difference might be as a result of a difference in specialization. Due to the difference in specialization, they usually interact with patients at different levels, during different parts of the treatment process. The difference also comes with a difference in the number of years of experience. Despite the various differences in opinions they all seem to agree on the importance of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the HITECH Act to healthcare provision. They also differ in the importance they give to being a member of any Accountable Care Organizations. Work Cited Baker, G R. High Performing Healthcare Systems: Delivering Quality by Design. Toronto: Longwoods Pub. Corp, 2008. Print. Bard, Marc, and Michael Nugent. Accountable Care Organizations: Your Guide to Design, Strategy, and Implementation. Chicago, Ill: Health Administration Press, 2011. Print. Hall, Randolph W. Patient Flow: Reducing Delay in Healthcare Delivery. New York: Springer, 2006. Internet resource. Tate, Nick J. Obamacare Survival Guide. West Palm Beach, FL: Humanix Books, 2012. Print. Wager, Karen A, Frances W. Lee, and John P. Glaser. Health Care Information Systems: A Practical Approach for Health Care Management. , 2013. Internet resource. Read More