Assignment: Health Organization Evaluation

Assignment: Health Organization Evaluation

Assignment: Health Organization Evaluation

Assessment Description

Research a health care organization or network that spans several states with in the United States (United Healthcare, Vanguard, Banner Health, etc.). Assess the readiness of the health care organization or network you chose in regard to meeting the health care needs of citizens in the next decade.

Health Organization Evaluation

The evaluation of health organizations allows stakeholders to develop effective responses to meet patient needs and remain sustainable. These organizations comprise of individuals with a common goal guided by regulations and responsibilities to help them succeed in their operations. Further, these entities can use a host of theories to attain their needs and have effective organization. The organizations can also develop strategies to resolve issues and culture with the aim of enhancing quality of care and patient satisfaction (Berger, 2019). The essence of this paper is to evaluate Providence Health Care as a healthcare organization. With operations in more than five states, the non-profit Catholic-based healthcare system comprises of more than 50 multiple facilities and over 800 non-acute care entities that supports several patient and health populations and communities to attain quality and affordable health care.

Description of Providence Health & Services

Providence is a healthcare organization operating across Alaska, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas and Washington. The non-profit Catholic-based organization operate 51 hospitals and over 1,000 clinics in the seven states. The organization’s mission statement is expressing God’s healing love, witnessed through Jesus Christ, and being steadfast in service to all, particularly the needy and vulnerable (Providence Health, 2021). The organization asserts that it uses its voice in advocating for the vulnerable population and required reforms in health care through pursuit of innovative ways to transform the sector by ensuring that people are healthy and making services more convenient, accessible and affordable.

The organization delivers care that is consistent with the values of the populations that it serves. The core values include compassion, justice, excellence, dignity and integrity. These values ensure that patients get assessed, diagnosed and treated in their community settings. The organization values communities and patients it serves to assist improve novel pathways for care, innovate new products and service and assist in the provision of better digital experience for increased patient satisfaction and quality outcomes (Providence Health, 2021). The organization collects data through surveys and analyzes it to develop best practices and policies to enhance patient satisfaction and promote better healthcare.

Organization’s Overall Readiness Based On Findings

As a comprehensive health care entity, Providence serves more people, advances best practices and continues its over 100-year tradition of providing services to poor and vulnerable in community. The organization delivers services in seven states, demonstrating its readiness to transform lives and enhance the health of Americans in the West to change care for the future generations. Providence Health works with different social and government agencies to assist in identification and assessment of specific needs within the community (Providence Health, 2021). Further, ir works with charitable foundations, community-based organizations and universities to offer effective solutions for particular needs based on their community health improvement plan. The organization has different community initiatives that include housing for homeless, provision of mental health services, increased access to health care services and increased investment in education.

The wide-ranging programs at Providence Health enhance community outreach and demonstrate its readiness to reach the needs of different communities and health populations. Their activities offer access to health care for present and future patients and education required to train compassionate and highly trained employees and members of community to enhance overall care quality and patient outcomes (Berger, 2019). The organization has 12 different entities offering education that comprise of a university, schools, child development centers and programs associated with healthcare provision. Based on its investment in communities and its workforce, the organization can make changes within the health care system to address various challenges and health disparities that impact low-income and vulnerable families, individuals and communities.

Strategic Plan in Addressing Issues Related to Network Growth, Nurse Staffing, Resource Management, Patient Satisfaction

Providence Health operates more than 50 facilities providing a wide-range of healthcare services in different areas and specialties targeted at various demographics, especially the vulnerable and poor. The organization is committed to offering high-quality, compassionate health to everyone irrespective of their coverage abilities. Therefore, the organization needs to address issues about its expansion by focusing on its caregivers and providers to reduce the turnover rates. Providence Health can allocate resources to expanding its network and locations through channeling funds meant to train and develop new employees (Dukhanin et al., 2018). The organization can also grow by partnering with community organizations in different areas of healthcare provision like mental health and substance use disorders. Focusing on expanded care provision and services will ensure that the organization grows sustainably to meet patient demands.

Sufficient nurse staffing levels are essential in improving the quality of care and enabling patients to attain better outcomes. Strategic planning for sufficient staffing levels can occur through effective assessment of patient acuity and having more staff through elaborate recruitment and training. Nurses impact patient satisfaction and sufficient levels ensure that patients access health services at affordable cost. The implication is that the facilities and their management can evaluate the level of patient satisfaction based on their interactions with nurses to ascertain if there is need for additional staff.

Health care organizations should embrace a culture of accountability to enhance effective use of resources. Accountability will ensure effective resource allocation and help the organization to meet its set healthcare delivery goals (Pan & Shen, 2018). Holding employees accountable improves their performance and overall organizational productivity. Accountability leads to effective communication and deployment of resources to train employees so as to attain require competencies that include expert knowledge and skills and application of best practices in care delivery. Therefore, the organization can enhance its resource management through effective accountability mechanisms like performance appraisal approaches.

Patient satisfaction is an essential aspect of healthcare delivery and assists in enhancing the health of individuals, families and communities served by a health organization. Positive patient experience leads to acceptance of the organization within the community. The organization can enhance patient satisfaction through effective adoption and deployment of technology (Berger, 2019). These include embracing technological trends like telehealth and telemedicine to enhance patient experience. Telehealth aspects like clinical decision support systems and electronic prescribing reduce susceptibility to adverse patient events like medication errors and hospital acquire infections (HAIs). Therefore, Providence can enhance patient satisfaction by adapting effective communication protocols and leveraging health information technologies based on feedback from health users and its providers.

Potential Issues within the Organizational Culture and Its Effects on Strategic Plan

The most prominent issue about the organization that affects its culture is its religious affiliation. Providence Health is a Catholic-based non-profit organization whose operations are founded on the faith’s doctrines and teachings. This may affect individuals from different religious faiths and organizations from accessing its services due to the differences. Patients have various religious and cultural affiliations and beliefs that contradict the organization’s perspective on different issues of care delivery; right from issue like abortion to same sex marriages (Yanow & Adams, 2018). The Catholic church is against these issues and individuals belonging to certain health populations like the lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender, (LGBT) may shy away from accessing its services. The issue of religious background and affiliation of the organization hinders its expansion to more communities and treating patients that may have different perspectives.

Theory to Support the Implement of the Strategic Plan for the Organization

Organizations base the implementation of their strategic plans on existing theoretical perspectives as these models offer directions and guidance on how to execute change for effective and targeted goals and outcomes. In this case, Providence Health can use systems theory to support its strategic plans. The system theory entails basing decisions on feedback loops to evaluate the current policies and procedures. The system model also allows the organization to seek opportunities to enhance its service provision for its target health population (Yanow & Adams, 2018). Through its response to feedback and views from patients and other stakeholders, Providence will attain future success and remain sustain in the healthcare industry. The model is essential for healthcare organization that seek better ways to enhance their operations and meet growing consumer demands.

Conclusion

Health organizations like Providence should focus on quality care improvement as the primary goal to meet the growing demand from diverse patient population. Through the approach, the organization will succeed and meet the rising needs of its stakeholders that include communities and patients that it serves. The evaluation of Providence Health demonstrates an entity keen on attaining its goals through effective service provision aimed at reducing health disparities, cost of health care and improving access by different patient populations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Berger, Z. (2019). Metrics of Patient, Public, Consumer, and Community Engagement in

Healthcare Systems: How Should We Define Engagement, What Are We Measuring, and Does It Matter for Patient Care? Comment on” Metrics and Evaluation Tools for Patient Engagement in Healthcare Organization-and System-Level Decision-Making: A Systematic Review”. International journal of health policy and management, 8(1), 49. DOI: 10.15171/ijhpm.2018.94

Dukhanin, V., Topazian, R., & DeCamp, M. (2018). Metrics and evaluation tools for patient

engagement in healthcare organization-and system-level decision-making: a systematic review. International journal of health policy and management, 7(10), 889.

doi: 10.15171/ijhpm.2018.43.

Pan, J., & Shen, H. (2018). Analysis of mass incident diffusion in Weibo based on self-

organization theory. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 491, 835-842.  DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2017.09.033

Providence Health (2021). About Us. .

Yanow, D., & Adams, G. B. (2018). Organizational culture. In Defining public administration

(pp. 137-146). Routledge.

Prepare a 1,000-1,250 word paper that presents your assessment and proposes a strategic plan to ensure readiness. Include the following:

Describe the health care organization or network.
Describe the organization’s overall readiness based on your findings.
Prepare a strategic plan to address issues pertaining to network growth, nurse staffing, resource management, and patient satisfaction.
Identify any current or potential issues within the organizational culture and discuss how these issues may affect aspects of the strategic plan.
Propose a theory or model that could be used to support implementation of the strategic plan for this organization. Explain why this theory or model is best.
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.

ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CLASS

Discussion Questions (DQ)

Initial responses to the DQ should address all components of the questions asked, include a minimum of one scholarly source, and be at least 250 words.
Successful responses are substantive (i.e., add something new to the discussion, engage others in the discussion, well-developed idea) and include at least one scholarly source.
One or two sentence responses, simple statements of agreement or “good post,” and responses that are off-topic will not count as substantive. Substantive responses should be at least 150 words.
I encourage you to incorporate the readings from the week (as applicable) into your responses.
Weekly Participation

Your initial responses to the mandatory DQ do not count toward participation and are graded separately.
In addition to the DQ responses, you must post at least one reply to peers (or me) on three separate days, for a total of three replies.
Participation posts do not require a scholarly source/citation (unless you cite someone else’s work).
Part of your weekly participation includes viewing the weekly announcement and attesting to watching it in the comments. These announcements are made to ensure you understand everything that is due during the week.
APA Format and Writing Quality

Familiarize yourself with APA format and practice using it correctly. It is used for most writing assignments for your degree. Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for APA paper templates, citation examples, tips, etc. Points will be deducted for poor use of APA format or absence of APA format (if required).
Cite all sources of information! When in doubt, cite the source. Paraphrasing also requires a citation.
I highly recommend using the APA Publication Manual, 6th edition.
Use of Direct Quotes

I discourage overutilization of direct quotes in DQs and assignments at the Masters’ level and deduct points accordingly.
As Masters’ level students, it is important that you be able to critically analyze and interpret information from journal articles and other resources. Simply restating someone else’s words does not demonstrate an understanding of the content or critical analysis of the content.
It is best to paraphrase content and cite your source.
LopesWrite Policy

For assignments that need to be submitted to LopesWrite, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me.
Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes.
Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own?
Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score.
Late Policy

The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies.
Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances.
If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect.
I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension.
As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading.
Communication

Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me:
Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class.
Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours.