Health Care and Transparency Issues

Standardization and Priorities of Healthcare Organizations Introduction As Leotsakos et al. (2014) note, standardization of patient safety in healthcare organizations has not proceeded with a great deal of progress in recent years though monumental steps have been made to increase patient safety in the industry.

For that reason the World Health Organization (2018) has made it a priority to address standardization by initiating the High 5s project “to facilitate the development, implementation and evaluation of standard operating procedures (SOPs) within to achieve measurable, significant and sustainable reductions in a number of challenging patient safety problems.” These developments are still needed and to improve safety, Gandalf and Merlino (n.d.) have discussed how transparency, healthcare reform, and critical issues such as market share play a role in the advancement of patient safety standardization in the industry.

This paper will examine the points made by Gandalf and Merlino in their podcast “The State of Patient Experience” and show how standardization and priorities of healthcare organizations relate to one another. Transparency Transparency is an area where improvements can stand to be made in healthcare organizations to facilitate the enhancement of patient safety policies. How so? Transparency opens up the window on care practice and shines a light in on exactly how well prepared care providers actually are.

Gandalf and Moreno give the example, for instance, of the University hospital in Utah: At the University of Utah, “when doctors’ scores and comments were published on their website, several things happened. First, the scores improved. Second, the doctors had many, many more positive comments than negative comments; and they liked seeing their positive comments out there. And third, it had a significant impact on their brand because it changed the search dynamics on a site like Google” (Gandalf & Merlino, n.d.).

This shows that transparency not only inspires more confidence in consumers and patients but also gives more incentive to care providers to be at their best so that they can both impress and give confidence to their patients. Improvements in transparency still need to be made, however, as Greenfield and Braithwaite (2009) note. They call for more transparency regarding continuous education of care providers. In the healthcare industry, care providers earn their degrees and then obtain positions in a healthcare organization where they are able to treat patients.

However, as the science of medicine is continuously advancing and bringing new information to light that can help improve quality care for patients, care providers are constantly advised to engage in continuous care so that the field does not leave them behind. To bring more transparency to the healthcare organization, the continuous education performance of care providers could be published letting patients and colleagues know who is doing their continuous education and who is not.

Like with the publication of test scores, this would likely improve the rate of continuous education among care providers, and it would likely improve the confidence levels of patients as well. Healthcare Reform Healthcare reform is another area addressed by Gandalf and Merlino in their podcast. Reforms like the Affordable Care Act have helped to introduce metrics into the healthcare industry that can measure “safety, equality, the service experience—and it has linked provider performance to reimbursement.

And that is driving significant attention and change in healthcare” (Gandalf & Merlino, n.d.). The ability of healthcare reform to drive changes in the industry by bringing about a standardized approach to measuring performance and rewarding achievements is an essential part of prioritizing patient safety.

Simply by measuring, for instance, the number of hospital-acquired infections, or the number of readmissions, the healthcare organization and the government can come together to see how well patient safety is being addressed and whether subsidies need to be withheld until the facility is able to get its performance up to speed. Transparency Changes Healthcare Transparency changes healthcare by ensuring that care providers are held accountable to stakeholders.

It ensures that maximum information is made available to the public, to patients, to colleagues and administrators—which is helpful with bringing about changes in healthcare pertaining to prioritizing patient safety because the more information that is made available the better informed decisions can be. Administrators along with patients have a right to know how well prepared care providers actually are—whether it’s with respect to testing or to continuing education.

Other ways in which transparency can change healthcare, however, include areas such as opening up the door on the connection between industries—such as the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry. This level of transparency is certainly warranted, what with the opioid epidemic washing across the U.S. Drugs like fentanyl, which are manufactured by Big Pharma and then promoted by doctors for patient use, are highly addicted—some 40x more powerful than heroin.

Instead of patients simply accepting the recommendation of doctors on what drugs to take, they should be given a transparency report that describes the care providers’ interactions with the pharmaceutical industry and what kind of incentives doctors are being given to promote these highly addictive drugs. This would bring about tremendous change in the healthcare industry.

Critical Issues Issues that are critical to healthcare organizations range from market share to patient experience to safety, and each organization has its own approach to prioritizing these issues, as Gandalf and Merlino point out. The problem with this is that there is no standard among organizations regarding prioritizing these issues and setting the bar for what should come first. This is an issue because at the end of the day, the healthcare industry is a free market industry that is not entirely regulated by the government.

In other words, the industry has not been nationalized as it has in other countries where healthcare is overseen by the state, like in the UK.

In the U.S., every organization is typically privately owned and that means the organizations themselves prioritize what is important to them—whether that is dominating the market and making obtaining market share the most important point on their agenda or actually engaging in developing a policy that will better ensure patient safety—such as by instituting a nursing peer review process or by implementing a hygiene protocol that all nurses and physicians would be required to follow.

Healthcare organizations really should prioritize issues like cost and safety before attempting to place market share at the top of their list. Healthcare costs are universally recognized as being too high, for instance, and yet healthcare organizations do not typically address this issue because they are there to make a profit not simply to provide care.

Because of this they all too often ignore that recommendation of health care reform—such as the Affordable Care Act, which promotes the idea of preventive care over endless rounds of treatment and testing. But as the government is in the business of subsidizing treatments and tests, which mean more profits for hospitals, the healthcare organizations do not mind doing one round of tests after another for patients so long as patients are willing to keep coming back for more.

Were they actually engaging in preventive care and making this a priority, the cycle of patients through the door would likely drop as more of them would be taking the preventive steps recommended by their nurses and doctors. So ultimately the number one priority that healthcare organizations.