Healthcare Business Operation and Internal Assessment - Essay Example

1. Compare and contrast at least two methods of assessing healthcare organizations’ operational needs and explain how they differ based upon a particular setting.

In assessing the healthcare, operational needs qualitative and quantitative research methods are used. This includes patient interviews, demographic profiling, surveys, mortality rate reviews, and morbidity rate charting. To use these methods, a project team is formed which is responsible for assessing health care operational needs. From this team, there are different people who are responsible for the management, data collection, and analysis.

Qualitative methods involve a collection of statistical and mathematical methods, which are employed in healthcare organizations for the purpose of assessing the healthcare organization’s operational needs (Neil, 2001). These methods can be used to evaluate the performance in health care organizations, as well as financial issues such as analysis of revenues and expenditures. Quantitative methods involve the evaluation of unquantifiable aspects of healthcare organizations such as patients’ satisfaction and continuity of care. That is the determination of the strengths and weaknesses in providing service in the health organizations.

Through qualitative and quantitative methods that are closely related and serve almost similar functions in assessing the healthcare needs of an organization, they have a number of differences. For example, the quantitative methods are based on numbers and statistics thus the method is reproducible while the quantitative method is not reproducible. Another difference is that quantitative models rely on past trends and statistics to make predictions and aid in decision making while, on the other hand, qualitative methods rely more on judgmental or managerial opinion to predict the future and to make decisions.

While quantitative methods involve analysis of things such as pricing, the number of patients attending the hospital, qualitative methods involve analysis of the capabilities of the health organizations’ resources to meet the customers’ needs (Neil, 2001).

2. What is the purpose of a balanced scorecard?

A balanced scorecard is a framework that is conceptual, and it is used in an organization to translate the organization's important objectives into indicators of performance. These indicators are distributed among different perspectives: learning and growth, financial, internal business processes, and customer (Kumara, 2012). Some of these indicators measure the progress of the organization as it aims at achieving its mission while others are used to measure long term drivers for success.

How is the balanced scorecard used to lead and manage an organization?

The scorecard is a very valuable in the management of an organization as it helps in monitoring the organizations’ current performance (customer satisfaction, finance, and the business process results) and the efforts that the organization put in place to educate and motivate employees, improve the process and also to enhance and its information systems. The scorecard provides a comprehensive framework that translates the objectives of an organization into performance measures to the executives of an organization (Kumara, 2012). The managers use the four perspectives to chose measures which complement the traditional financial to the performance measures for internal processes, customer, improvement of activities, and innovations.

How can a scorecard be linked to organizational effectiveness as well as individual performance evaluation?

The major objective of each perspective is set so as to ensure that there is effectiveness in the management. For effectiveness in the evaluation of performance, the scorecard has set goals that need to be achieved in each perspective and this acts as a parameter for measuring the progress of the company’s performance towards their objectives. Through the scorecard the company is able to set specific targets in the identified key areas hence through this, individuals are evaluated and rewarded where necessary.