The Affordable Care Act Will Provide Health Insurance Coverage

On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Healthcare bill into law. There has been much controversy over this Affordable Healthcare Act before and since it was signed into law. It was estimated that 30 million people would sign up for the new healthcare and that the healthcare industry would need a bigger workforce. Within hospitals across the United States there is already a shortage of nursing and medical staff. What will this new law mean for hospitals in their declining health care professionals? In what other ways will this healthcare law impact hospitals across the United States? This paper will attempt to explore some of the realities and possibilities in greater depth.

Throughout this course I have learned about the various challenges that impede productivity and efficiency at today’s hospitals. These issues facing the modern healthcare organization come in varying forms from technological, staffing, and financial to name a few. There are no limits to what hospitals can face in these modern technologically savvy times. Below are the major issues that today’s hospitals are facing, though there are many facets to these topics it will be described as best as possible to meet overall challenges:

Americans demanded to know what benefits they get to require while this act would be in place. On behalf of the first act it requires personal to be a U.S citizen and legal resident in order to have health insurance coverage or pay a penalty, because only residents of the 50 states can access this act and prove that they are a legal resident in order to apply. Also in order to make coverage more accessible and affordable Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act creates a new title called American Health Benefit Exchanges through which individuals who generally do not have access to afford employer coverage, yet small businesses can purchase coverage. Connecting to the Health care workforce more employees can now have a better health

Did you know that in the year of 2012, nearly all of the Americans ages nineteen to sixty-four, which is nearly 85 million Americans that were uninsured? According to healthcareproblems.org , in America healthcare is one of the most talked about and economically challenged problems facing the U.S. today. Health care should be reduced to a reasonable price that which everyone can afford, but people disagree due to laws against it.

Obamacare will impose new health coverage costs, the employer mandate, compliance regulations, and new taxes on all businesses. Altogether, these constraints will dramatically affect companies’ per-employee costs, desire to provide health coverage, and motivation to grow in terms of both income and employment. Further Burdening Businesses. Obamacare is likely to exacerbate many of the concerns and costs that are already burdening businesses—particularly small-business owners—in at least four ways. 1.

“Long wait times could potentially result in worse patient outcomes, greater patient suffering, patient dissatisfaction, more difficulty retaining and recruiting staff, a higher risk of infectious disease outbreaks and an increased risk of medical errors” (Ducharme, Alder, Pelletier, Murray, & Tepper, p. 456). This article explored how the addition of nurse practitioners and physician assistants in 6 Ontario emergency departments could help to reduce wait time, patient flow, and the number of patients who left without being seen (Ducharme, Alder, Pelletier, Murray, & Tepper, p. 455). This study was seen to be the first of its kind in analyzing effects in an emergency department on patient flow by adding nurse practitioners and physician assistants to the healthcare team (Ducharme, Alder, Pelletier, Murray, & Tepper, p. 459). The quantitative study design used for this study was the experimental design since it was based on implementation and evaluation of the effects (Keele, p. 41). The article does not address how the sample size was determined and actually

Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, emergency department (ED) volume has increased exceeding 15% over budget in our facility in approximately one-year. This phenomenon is not isolated to our facility, it is a nationwide issue (American College of Emergency Physicians, 2014). In addition, ED lobby wait time has increased and the left without being seen (LWBS) numbers have climbed to over 6%. Furthermore, the ED was increasingly boarding admitted patients.

Soleimanpour et. al (2011) explained that patient satisfaction is an essential component in the Emergency Department (ED) because it is the entrance for patients to receive their initial treatments. The most important and single possible cause for ED patients’ flow problem is the availability of inpatients beds (Peck et. al, 2012). The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) (2011) explained that the primary cause of ED overcrowding is boarding; which was defined as holding patients in the ED after the admission had been completed due to unavailability of inpatient beds. Lutheran Medical Center faced this problem and in his paper will discuss analysis of the problem, determination of possible quality lapses, identification of performance measures, designing and evaluation of the interventions and reporting of the results.

In the ever-changing world of healthcare, we are confronted with many challenges for the road ahead. To learn about some of these upcoming challenges my group interviewed Dr. Devin Fox at Creighton University Medical Center. He is the Chief Medical Officer at the Hospital and teaches some at the medical school. He was an interesting fellow to interview and he definitely was knowledgeable on the topics we covered. He has been the CMO at the CHI branch of Creighton for 3 years. He covered a variety of topics including quality outcomes, personality challenges, new practices within medicine, and the upcoming building for the emergency department on Cumming Street. I will cover some on quality and productive isolation, but mainly focus on population management and the discussion we had. In this paper I will discuss population management as a concept, then talk about how certain population management programs are more effective for today’s healthcare market, and I will discuss how those programs are the future of healthcare in America. All will help describe the interview with Dr. Fox and illuminate the healthcare Administrator field.

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) states crowding as, “the identified need for emergency services exceeds available resources for patient care in the ED, hospital or both” (acep.org). What is fueling these incidents is the rapid increase in ED visits combined with diminishing numbers of ED. In a study conducted by the Academic Emergency Medicine explains that, “ ED crowding is worsening in the US as demonstrated by longer waiting times to see clinicians and is likely exacerbated by the worsening problem of ED boarding, where admitted patients often stay for long periods in the ED waiting for inpatient bed placement” (Aronsky et al., 2011; p. 528). Crowding could possibly affect clinical outcomes, such as mortality, which may adversely lead to delays for time sensitive patients. These outcomes would then lead to a higher rate of patient dissatisfaction within the ED, thus leading to an increase amount of patients left without being seen (LWBS) rates.

Getting patients in and out help both patients and nurses. Getting patients happy and not having to sit there very long. To help with getting patients in and out fast could be with the electronic health records. Updates like these in the Emergency Rooms can work to make things smoother. Nurses will always be working their best to get things done in the best way possible. If that means no breaks and working longer hours for patient satisfaction higher, they will. Health records, hours, uniforms and hours are all changing in the Emergency Room. If that means the way health records change over from paper to electronic or having nurses uniforms change to pants and not dresses. Having said all this fantastic information about the changes in the Emergency Rooms things are getting better. So next time you go to the emergency room look to see how long you have to wait, look how they ask you question and put in the computer, how they can just pull up your chart fast, know all of your information and how the nurses uniforms look professional. Emergency Rooms have been around and being upgraded all the

There are consistent reports across all studies that show overcrowding and patient flow is a big challenge at the emergency department (ED) that affects the quality of patient care. Bahena and Andreoni (2013) included increasing the number of patients, untimely and inefficient primary care, frequent flyer, special circumstances such as influenza season, and the change in the health care delivery system as reasons contributing to overcrowding. DeFlitch, Geeting, and Paz (2015) mentioned that overcrowding can be associated with less timely care, decreases patient satisfaction, ineffective care, and poor outcome. Quattrini, and Swan (2011) revealed the consequences of overcrowding as risk of poor patient outcome, lengthy waiting times and boarding

Capacity issues are something hospitals are facing more and more every day. Patients who have been admitted wait sometimes for hours up to days for a bed to open up on an inpatient unit. This delay takes up bed space and resources in the Emergency Department leading to increased delays for others to be seen. Waiting to be seen is a huge dissatisfier to our clients and can pose a safety risk when patients are not seen quickly.

The cost of the health care industry has always been rising since the early 1980s. It has been a growing concern in both the industry and society. Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) is no exception. Even though the average length of stay (LOS) for the patients in MGH has been declining (Exhibit 10), it is still the highest compared to their competitors (Exhibit 6). Besides the cost, there is no uniformity of process and standardization across different facilities and departments of the hospital. MGH lacks communication and coordination between the facilities.

Over the last several years, hospitals have been dealing with an increase in the total number of patients. This is because a larger percentage of people are living longer and there is more demand for these services. As greater amounts of the population is reaching the age of 65 and beyond (i.e. the Baby Boomers). This is placing strains on existing facilities to meet the needs of patients. The results are that health care providers and professionals are becoming overworked. This is leading to reduced response times. (Giganete, 2010) (Dowd, 2012)