Access to care in managed care program - Essay Example

Healthcare provider office practices determine the level of success that the actual healthcare given achieves. In the paper titled Capacity Planning and Management in Hospitals, Green (16) notes that the enormity of the issues behind the pressure from cost benefit analysis presses practices to be a one sided affair. The main issues in organization of healthcare institutions include the introduction of competition in the health industry coupled to the reduction of government subsidies. Practices at the healthcare facilities are therefore not only tending towards complete commercialization but also rising cost that the author feels continually impacts in effective reduction in patient access.

Without the best approach that is cognizant of modified management tools to fit in the changing health care sector, practices at the facilities will continue to face hardships in achieving appropriate delivery of healthcare. Alternatively, the types of managed care model in which the providers are involved dictate the manner in which the delivery of healthcare services is conducted. Several models of managed care programs exist with an implication on the fact that the specialized needs of each attract a certain form of operation that would not operate in a different model setting.

Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) models include closed panel, staff model, group model, open panel, Independent Practice Association (IPA), network model, and mixed model (TMCI, 2). Each of these models has inherent requirements that uniquely dictate the order of operations and access for health care by individuals. For instance, when dealing with a mental health facility, standard and village settings are differently modeled. The village type has restrictions which may effectively reduce the general access by the public in comparison with the other types of models (TVISA,