Health care standards

In order to accelerate the creation of health care standards, members of government, academics who teach health care, and professionals in the field of health care and technology have to work together and collaborate to develop the standards that will work for all. Each plays a role in the finally delivery of health care to patients and so each should play a part in the formulation of the standards that are created that will govern how quality care is provided. As Reid, Comptom, Grossman and Fanjiang (2005) have noted, inter-collaboration among the various stakeholders and role players should include “calls for public- and private-sector investments in research and development, demonstration projects, new approaches to reimbursement, expanded outreach and dissemination efforts by public- and private-sector health care quality improvement organizations, actions to advance the development of health care data, software, and network standards and other components of a National Health Information Infrastructure.” Nursing instructors, doctors, health care professionals and legislators all have to work together to understand what the appropriate standards of care should be. As there are many vendors involved in providing care, quality cannot be ensured unless each industry takes part in the creation.
However, to promote this inter-collaboration and to accelerate the change, the role of government in the creation of health care standards should be more pronounced. The government is the body that has the power to legislate and the power to oblige the industry to create standards of health care that can be used in a meaningful way. The health care industry itself is simply too big to act on its own: it needs guidance and a call to action from the government, moved by legislation. As Schoenbaum, Audet and Davis (2003) put it, “ideally, leadership would emerge from within the industry, but that is unlikely in a system with so many independent components” (p. 185). The fact is that in the industry there are “more than 5,500 acute care hospitals, 18,000 nursing homes, 800,000 physicians, and myriad other health professionals; licensure boards and regulatory agencies in all fifty states and other jurisdictions; multiple accrediting organizations; hundreds of professional organizations, boards, and societies; hundreds of insurers; and thousands of self-insured payers” (Schoenbaum et al., 2003, p. 185). That means there are simply too many members within that industry for anything to get moving organically. To accelerate change, the government would have to organize the main players, call upon representatives from each part of the industry, and develop a committee to create adequate health care standards that all can ascribe to.
Straube (2013) notes that the government is naturally the best option for observing and overseeing the health care industry as it seeks to create a set of standards for itself. Likewise, Tang, Eisenberg and Meyer (2004) point that “government's responsibility to protect and advance the interests of society includes the delivery of high-quality health care” (p. 47). In other words the government is responsible for ensuring that the health care industry is regulated and responsible, and its role in facilitating the creation of health care standards should be obvious: extending from its duty to protect and advance society’s interests is the duty to assist and oversee the industry in creating the standards needed to deliver quality care. Thus, by forming partnerships at local, state and national levels with industry players and developing a committee and tasking that committee with creating the standards required, the acceleration can begin and patients would at last be served.
References
Reid, P. P., Compton, W. D., Grossman, J. H., & Fanjiang, G. (2005). Building a better
delivery system: a new engineering/health care partnership (Vol. 15). Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22882/
Schoenbaum, S. C., Audet, A. M. J., & Davis, K. (2003). Obtaining greater value from
health care: the roles of the US government. Health Affairs, 22(6), 183-190.
Straube, B. M. (2013). A role for government: an observation on federal healthcare
efforts in prevention. American journal of preventive medicine, 44(1), S39-S42.
Tang, N., Eisenberg, J. M., & Meyer, G. S. (2004). The roles of government in improving
health care quality and safety. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety, 30(1), 47-55.