Harvard Business Review 's Fixing Health Care From Inside & Out

According to Porter-O’Grady, 2016 et al p 324, our healthcare systems today are at the center of what is considered major change. Much of the change today is directly related to the foundational principles, concepts and associated with complexity in systems and relationships, and an understanding by nurse leader and follower; of what it takes to make meaningful change. Nurse Leaders, registered nurses, advance practice nurses, and other followers, at every level of our organizations must be increasingly aware of meaningful and sustainable changes that improves our healthcare systems (Porter-O’Grady, 2016 et al p 324).

Do you know leaders in healthcare have a new style of managing? Healthcare field is one of the fields that changes occur frequently. With the introduction of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) brought a lot of changes in every aspect of healthcare delivery, from reimbursement to quality control to elimination of wasteful and inefficient practices and having huge impact on the U.S. healthcare delivery system, with many more changes to come. When leaders in healthcare organizations are asked, “what’s the one word that best characterizes the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the U.S. healthcare delivery system,” most will answer “change”. These changes also brought new managing styles to healthcare leaders. I would be writing in my own discourse community, which is Health Systems Management. To give guide lines for a neighbor who is thinking of jointing this discourse community, how we operate and to be successful in this filed.

Quality improvement, patient safety, and cost containment are some of the key focuses of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010. Therefore, many Healthcare Organizations (HCOs) were confronted with the challenge of changing their organization behavior, so that they can deliver a safe care without compromising on qualities and increasing on expenditures with each care delivery (KPMG Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Institute, 2011). The purpose of the paper is to discuss a HCO’s transformation challenge, its subsystem within a larger system, its culture and climate, its leadership style, its assessment based on Collin’s Good to Great, and its readiness for change in today’s complex environment.

Health care is in a constant state of change. Health care organizations must recognize that change is needed to improve the quality and safety of patient care, retain employees, and restructure the organizational chart to maintain their viability. When changes are carefully and deliberately thought through using the knowledge and skill of leaders, this is considered planned change. The change agent plays a major role in the outcome of the change; whether the change is successful or unsuccessful (Marquis & Huston, 2012). The purpose of this paper is to identify a deficiency within a department of a healthcare organization. A description of the planned change to address the deficiency will be

HRET's activities have clearly been geared toward uncovering innovative paths to just this kind of impact value (HRET, 2007). Their efforts over a number of years have demonstrated a planned effort for understanding the issues at hand and then for offering leadership and pragmatic organization directions for making change not just possible but desirable. These kinds of steps have been widely recognized as the required elements of assessing and acting on deficiencies as well as for laying the foundation to encourage greater top to bottom participation in quality management and care.

You pinned important questions on how our community can impact lives, and solve the health care disparity issue. You state, “Rising levels of inequality are associated with greater levels of mental illness and obesity and have lower life expediencies”. Certainly, innovation and creativity of new ideologies to infuse and energize health care organizations teams are pivot points. I experienced that Kaiser Permanente has a well-structured organizational dynamic, where leadership talks actions and result.

American healthcare is very unique and complex. Escape Fire does a great job at trying to uncover the truths of healthcare in the United States (U.S.). According to Collins, Gunja, and Beutel (2015), 10.4 percent of the U.S. population, or 33 million people, were uninsured in 2014. This is a decrease from 2013 when 13.3 percent of Americans were uninsured. The decline in uninsured rates has been attributed to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA makes healthcare available to most people by subsidizing insurance through the health care marketplace, which

Johanna Bellon, MS, CFA is a PhD student working at the University of Pittsburgh Health Policy Institute with Everette James. Prior to beginning the PhD program, Johanna worked as a financial consultant in the Healthcare Industry Group at Alvarez and Marsal. She consulted on a variety of projects, involving qualitative and quantitative analysis to achieve acquisitions, restructurings, and strategic realignments within large health systems. From this work she developed an interest in how healthcare organizations innovate and effectively achieve sustainable changes within a challenging and turbulent environment. She is currently working on four research projects within the National Center on Interprofessional Practice and Education that explore

Fixing healthcare from Inside and Out is a collection of HBR articles that all propose several solutions to fix healthcare. The first step to fix healthcare is from the inside and acknowledging that there is no single strategy. Many healthcare professionals from all over the country are trying to figure out solutions to the most complex industry in America. The main goal of healthcare is to maximize value for patients by achieving the best outcomes at the lowest cost possible which can be done though The Toyota Production System. Moving towards a patient centered system instead of being supply driven is another one of the key concepts the book expands on. The focus about healthcare being a business needs to be shifted to healthcare being a

For an industry in which change is always constant, it is puzzling to note that the healthcare industry has done a poor job of navigating the change arena. This is an

With Midwestern Health Systems, the challenges of two distinct leaders within the organization was one of their biggest hurdles to overcome, one always felt “stepped on” by the other and vice versa. As changes were implemented, there were no meetings or discussions about the possibility of such changes before they were implemented, so how to overcome these challenges? Over 90% of employees in most organizations believe that if they have a better understanding of the organizations strategy, there would be an improved likelihood of successful implementation. But the challenges were greater than they thought. From its inception in 1997 the integration of the Clinic division with the hospital division created great conflict between management. By having two separate Management teams, the concept of implementing change seemed unattainable.

Healthcare organizations must continually make adjustments to maintain optimal function (Christiansen 2002). A number of different techniques can be used to determine where adjustments need to be made. One essential technique involves a discussion of an organization’s strengths, weaknesses,

Health care organizations are complex and require several interconnected parts to operate effectively. The employees, hospital staff, and administration work together to ensure that a health care organization runs properly. Sometimes health care organizations grow so large that the overall quality of the organization is diminished. Healthcare organizations are constantly changing and discovering ways to improve quality. Improving the quality of healthcare organizations is a challenging task. Individuals who are in charge of improving the quality of a health care organization must be highly trained and have clearly communicated goals. If the quality of a health care organization is improved, then its patient’s employees, hospital staff, administrators and surrounding community will benefit.

The healthcare system and within the hospital structures are witnessing a significant change in the process of assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation and stabilization. Traditionally changes were seen and accustomed from policy initiatives and managed by the hospitals, but now many leading hospitals and management teams including nurses and physicians have realized that change is a very difficult and complex task, especially surrounding healthcare and patient care and safety. In this modern age especially, the healthcare organizations face an uncertainty and ambiguity caused by change every day (ANCC, 2008).

George Bernard Shaw said, “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Being in the healthcare sector, I have come to realized that to be part of something great; one has to be open-minded and be willing to embrace change in all aspects of practice. Nevertheless, it is crucial that the change agent employ a change model that has been tried, tested and successful in implementing change. In other to halt the upsurge in health care cost, health care organizations and providers are leading the course of quality improvement projects that lower cost, and improve outcomes.