Health care organization

Hierarchical factors occur under the commonest assumption, namely that of physicians in contracted employment the insurer sets a series of targets (not all of them explicit) for the health care organization. It should not be taken for granted that these targets pursue efficiency. In turn, the health care organizations - the providers - attempt to transfer the targets (and incentives) received from the insurer or insurers to the clinics, who in the case of prescription allocate the totality of the resources. 

This chapter on prescriber incentives brings together various midpoints, all of them difficult to find. One of these midpoints concerns incentives (if there is one distinguishing feature of health care organizations it is the advisability of moderating the power of incentives in order to stop financial considerations from short-circuiting clinical considerations) another concerns the balance between health policy issues and industrial policy ones and a third concerns the influences exerted on prescription by the market, the state and clinical standards (the combination of financial and non-financial incentives). 

TABLE 6 Recommendations to Health Care Organizations to Reduce Errors Due to Labeling and Packaging of Drug Products and Related Devices (Adopted March 30, 1998)... 

The Couneil recommends the establishment of a systems approach to reporting, understanding, and prevention of medication errors in health care organizations. The organization s leaders should foster a culture and systems that include the following key elements ... 

In addition, the Council makes the following recommendations to health care organizations to reduce errors due to labeling and packaging of drug products and related devices ... 

The Council recommends that health care organizations employ machine readable coding (e.g., bar coding) in the management of the medication use proeess. 

Bates, D.W., Preventing Medication Errors. In Medication Use A Systems Approach to Reducing Errors (D.D. Cousins, ed.). Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, Oakbrook Terrace, IL, 1999, pp. 57-73. 

Weinstein MC. Principles of cost-effective resource allocation in health care organizations. Int J Technol Assess Health Care 1990 6 93-103. 

Hospitals and other health care organizations work to reduce medication errors by using technology, improving processes, zeroing in on errors that cause harm, and building a culture of safety. Here are a couple of examples. 

Provide an overview of planning activities conducted by pharmacy and health care organizations. 

What are the different activities that pharmacies and health care organizations engage in when they plan for the future ... 

The scenario illustrates an important activity within pharmacies and health care organizations that is rarefy... 

The concepts discussed in this chapter become only more important as one advances through a career and assumes higher levels of leadership and responsibility in a pharmacy or health care organization. It is also important for students and new practition-... 

Conduct an Internet search of vision and mission statements of health care organizations. Identify and compare the statements from at least three different organizations. What are the strengths and weakness of these statements ... 

The Joint Commission is a nonprofit organization founded in 1951 by the American Medical Association and the American College of Surgeons (O Malley, 1997). The Joint Commission was established to continuously improve the safety and quality of health care provided to the public through the provision of health care accreditation and related services that support performance improvement in health care organizations ... 

While health care accreditation organizations have existed for quite a while, quality data were not readily available to the general public until recendy. These quality measurements (sometimes called report cards ) make health care quality indicators readily available to the public. This encourages health care organizations to compete on the basis of quality and creates markets where quality, not just cost containment, is rewarded (Blumenthal and Kilo, 1998 O Malley, 1997). 

Since establishment of the Joint Commission, the scope of health care organizations that are eligible for accreditation has widened from hospitals to encompass health systems and now even pharmacy benefit... 

What role does emotion have in a health care organization How might we better understand its importance ... 

The scenario depicts an all too common situation in health care organizations, in which employees lack direction and guidance in their jobs. As a result, the quality and quantity of work suffers, and the work environment becomes intolerable. Without human resources management, even professionals such as pharmacists can lose direction. 

Most important, involved practitioners and health care organizations must avoid being perceived as the villain. It is one thing to be presented as well-meaning... 

Leadership is an important concept that transcends all health care professions. The acceptance of this role by all health care professionals is vital to the invention of new technologies and dosage forms, changes in the delivery of health care, enhancement of patient outcomes and quality of life, and success of their specific health care organization. The opportunities for pharmacists to be leaders in their practice setting, the pharmacy profession, and the community are plentiful. Leadership is a critical component for positive change within pharmacy organizations and the profession. 

Professional pharmacy and medical organizations [e.g., the American Pharmacists Association (APhA), the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), the National Community Pharmcists Association (NCPA), and the American Medical Association (AMA)] and health care organizations [e.g., the American Diabetes Association (ADA) or the American Heart Association (AHA)] also provide valuable information about many health conditions and value-added services. This information is important not only in the development of a service but also in justifying the need for a service with consumers and administrators. These organizations also provide treatment guidelines and additional resources that can be used when developing an operations plan for a service (see Chapter 25). 

Many health care organizations make the mistake of focusing on only one area of health care when trying to reduce the overall cost of health care. Evaluating the cost of a single aspect of patient care in isolation from all... 

Costs of goods and services seem intuitively simple to quantify. However, a number of potentially complicated issues must be considered. When identifying the goods or services, will the actual cost (wholesale cost) to the pharmacy or health care organization be measured, or will the charge to the patient or payer (retail cost) be measured Sometimes access to cost data may be limited, or the data may be entirely unavailable. For instance, if Cynthia Marshall was using a hospital database to collect hospitalization and emergency department information for the HMOs heart failure patients, it may be impossible to isolate the actual costs related to heart failure, particularly if a patient was admitted for multiple reasons. 

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