Healthcare management concepts and practices

Health Care Management

There is both cohesiveness and autonomy within Samaritan Medical Center and its affiliates, which primarily include long-term care facility Samaritan Keep Home, assisted living community Samaritan Summit Village, and both Samaritan Auxiliary and Samaritan Medical Center Foundation of Northern New York, Inc. (Samaritan, 2014). Samaritan Medical Center is the principle organization in this collective and provides a variety of inpatient and outpatient health care services to both the military and the civilian communities within upstate New York. The organizational structure includes a top down approach which is led by a respective Board of Trustees for each of the preceding five organizations. Board members have specific positions including chairperson, secretary, treasurer, and others, and are responsible for governing the administration team which implements the directives and general direction denoted by the board members. The administration team for Samaritan Medical Center includes heads of all the major areas of health care facilities, including finances, community services, long-term care, patient care, information services, medical affairs, and operations (Samaritan, 2014).

2. The organizational structure greatly influences the daily operations of each entity in the Samaritan Medical Center collective. Specifically, board members decide what sorts of policies and objectives they want to see implemented. The administrative team is responsible for devising methods of implementing those goals. The administration team's decisions are acted upon by the various personnel within the Samaritan Medical Center who fulfill the objectives of the Board members. As previously alluded to, operations personnel are involved at the administrative level to ensure that its input is accepted and ultimately carried out by individual employees working within the many different areas of specialty within the medical center.

3. The organizational structure of Samaritan Medical Center and its affiliate centers greatly impacts its ability to function efficiently. This fact is largely attributed to the clear hierarchy and chain of command of leadership. The Board of Directors establishes a particular vision for the center (Samaritan), the administrative team delineates exactly how to accomplish it, and then the operations personnel is responsible for carrying out the administration's strategy so that it works. Each individual in this chain of command has specific functions and tasks which they carry out without ambiguity so that the center is able to deliver the most efficacious care to its patients.