Healthcare Management

Quantifying Value

The new economics of healthcare

Healthcare organisations are redefining value and have been forced to think in new ways about the process of care delivery.

This premier healthcare institution defines value as more than good outcomes and lowered expenses. Their definition of value also incorporates patient safety and good service, and in doing so integrates concepts that can define the vision of the organization. Value involves quality care, lowered costs, patient safety and satisfaction with the experience. This concept is very different from one stressing volume.

Value-based Healthcare

Value-based healthcare is an approach to providing care that aims to restrict the growth in healthcare costs while maintaining or improving quality. The United States Medicare and Medicaid programs, along with a few pioneering employers and private health systems, are testing multiple strategies in this social experiment.

Strategic Planning of Healthcare Delivery Centres

Role of operations management

Operations management is the strategic implementation of programmes, techniques, and tools for reducing costs and improving quality. It focuses on the effective management of the resources and activities that produce and deliver goods and services of a business. In healthcare, effective use of operative management tools outcomes into improved quality of care, reduction in bottlenecks and waiting times, reduction in medical errors, better utilisation of existing beds, reduction in staff overtime and increase in staff satisfaction and finally improves the financial performance of the hospital.

The Adoption, Buy In, and Change of Health Information Exchange

For those who follow news in the healthcare IT world, not too many days pass without some mention of a health information exchange (HIE) being formed, whether through a government-backed initiative or a private venture. A lot of attention (and money) is being given to the area, but how much real progress has been made? How far have HIE vendors moved past flashy press releases into actual data exchange?

Emerging Healthcare Delivery Models in India

The current restricted healthcare delivery models need to focus on preventive aspects in healthcare and create functional progressivereferral systems managing bulk of healthcare at the 'front' or the primary healthcare level, for better healthcare delivery models.

The Role of Quality and Quality Management Systems in Telemedicine

To secure and demonstrate quality of their processes a growing number of providers of medical care establish quality management systems (QMS) following international quality standards like e.g. EN ISO 9001:2008.

Reforming Claims Processing with Real Time Adjudication

Real Time Claims Processing significantly reforms how healthcare claims are submitted, adjudicated, remitted and paid and helps make the process far more efficient.

Chronic Illness and Cultural Diversity

Communicative challenges for patients and physicians

Medical communication is always a tightrope walk between the medical expertise of the physician and the more or less naïve and lay perspectives of the patient.

Prevention through Anticipation

A key to success in occupational risk prevention

Safety and health is one of the major problems in workplaces. In 1996 the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work was set up with the aim to make workplaces safer and healthier for the working population of the 27 European Member States. It collects, analyses and disseminates information on occupational safety and health for the whole EU.

Paying Attention

Improving safety through leadership involvement

The Krasnoff Quality Management Institute (KQMI) has developed a relational database to support weekly system patient safety rounds. The tool offers users a method to input the information gathered at the weekly hospital safety rounds and to create a repository of safety concerns.

Health 2.0

Smarter patients, smarter healthcare

Health 2.0 would make it possible to stem the increase in healthcare expenses, relieve the pressure on staffing levels in hospitals and make healthcare systems more efficient.

Customised and Coordinated Care

Leaving the comfort zone

Like in other industries the power of the individual is increasingly influencing how healthcare is directed and delivered, enabled by the technological and the virtual world we live in. Incumbent models of care are struggling to keep up as healthcare volumes become more unmanageable.

Healthcare in India

Miles to go

India is the leading supplier of generics to the world and yet in India healthcare for all is a chimera. Research-oriented Indian pharmaceutical companies spend less than 10 per cent of their sales on research. Innovation plays a key role in mitigating unmet medical needs. Future success in the healthcare arena will increasingly depend on collaborations and partnerships between all stakeholders.

Indian Healthcare Reforms

A much needed prescription

The first major change in Indian healthcare system started way back in 1946 by the recommendation of 'Bhore Committee'. Since then it has been a journey of various swings in ups and downs. The challenges are enormous and remedies are limited. India, with huge population base, needs reforms in areas of technology, resource availability, public-private partnership as top priority, to redefine progression in healthcare system.

Quality of Healthcare

Value of accreditation

Accreditation is recognised as a framework to integrate a quality management system while reducing risk, and requires a systematic assessment of hospitals against explicit standards.

Advance Care Planning

A new intervention

Advance Care Planning is a healthcare intervention in which the patient plans in advance in making ones healthcare decisions for which we do not know the overall balance of benefit to harm and risk.

The Lean Way

Improving healthcare performance

Organisational change and sustained improvement can be achieved using the same principles of strong leadership and lean deployment that have transformed major producers worldwide.

Urgent Care

The shift in emphasis

The UK National Health Service has seen a shift in emphasis in managing urgent care, from preventing emergency admissions to better management of care outside hospital. Benchmark out of hours services and improving the management of urgent care in general practice are the two recent initiatives in this shift.

Primary Healthcare in India

An ideal approach

Primary healthcare in India needs to be revamped and is in urgent need of reforms.

21st Century Healthcare

New paradigms

The 21st century is the century of the patient, or the citizen who might become a patient. Many health services are now based on a paradigm which assumes that the patient or citizen is competent and should be fully involved.

Effective Leadership for Patient Safety

Lessons from the 'Safer Patient Initiative'

Achieving success in the area of patient safety requires leaders to adopt a new approach.

Decision-Based Evidence Making

Developing tools and strategies for comparative effectiveness

Despite the publication of over 18,000 Randomised Clinical Trials (RCTs) each year, available clinical evidence is often of limited quality. Generating the evidence needed to support an evidence-based healthcare system will require collective effort, and needs to be driven by decision makers in the healthcare community such as patients, physicians, policymakers and payers.

Healthcare Disparities

Closing the gap

Eliminating healthcare disparities is the need of hour. The author discusses various options-increasing self-awareness among physicians, increasing minority representation in the workforce and collecting data and evidence based medicine to increase the quality-of-care for all individuals.

Direct Practice Medicine

Better outcomes, lower costs

Direct Practice Medicine (DPM) is a new model for healthcare that emphasises a deepening of the doctor-patient relationship. It eliminates the disruptive impact of set pricing of healthcare services, and the control of reimbursements by third-party payers. DPM aligns the medical and fiscal interests of doctor and patient, fostering a trusted relationship that increases the opportunities for improving health outcomes.

The Electronic Health Record

Delivering healthcare for the 21st century

An enhanced Appreciation of the connection between quality and coast has made the question of mass-market penetration of the EHR an issue of broad importance.

Ensuring Patient Safety

Role of regulation

Rules and regulations can only be truly effective in contributing towards patient safety if individual healthcare practitioners take on accountability for their own actions and omissions.

Cultural,Social & Linguistic Barriers

Can they be overcome?

Cultural, social and linguistic barriers are a great challenge for healthcare providers. In order to overcome these barriers, clinicians must rethink their daily clinical work. The data compared in this article show that immigrants in Europe differ from natives but also from their countrymen at home. The investigation of this population should help us to provide better healthcare.

Palliative Care

Reaching out to patients with heart failure

Patients with end stage heart failure and their carers carry a prolonged and heavy symptom burden that affects all domains of life. Moreover, access to supportive and palliative care is patchy, and recognition of the dying stage remains poor. Extending palliative care to this group of patients is now an important priority.

The 'vital signs' of Performance Improvement in Cardiac Outcomes

Every healthcare executive, administrator and clinical staff member has heard and understands the phrase 'vital signs'. The vital signs play an important role in monitoring the well-being of the patient. Using the analogy of 'vital signs', author explains the importance of identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to improve the healthcare services offered by the hospitals.

Lean in Primary Care

Sustaining transformation

Lean approaches have been widely adopted by hospitals, but application in the primary care setting has received less attention. Primary care can use a Lean approach to structure and sustain quality improvement work but, as with all quality improvement approaches, needs energy and committed leadership.

Emergency Services in India

Counting on betterment

India requires a better emergency medical service to meet the growing number of emergencies. What exists currently in the form of fragmented services across the country falls way short of meeting the requirement.

Personalised Healthcare

A transformational opportunity

Despite increasing healthcare costs, healthcare suffers from suboptimal quality and inefficiency. Personalised Healthcare offers the ransformational opportunity. This article discusses the science, enabling technologies,
opportunities and challenges of moving Personalised Healthcare forward.

Global Health Tourism with Qualified Rehabilitation

The international health tourism has increased in the last few years. Rehabilitation can play a significant role in improving healthcare tourism prospects. German experience in providing rehabilitation services illustrates the huge potential this sector holds in developing health tourism.

Care Pathways

The basics

Care pathways are considered to be one of the best tools hospitals can use to manage the quality in healthcare concerning the standardisation of care processes, since they promote organised and efficient patient care based on evidence. It has been proven that their implementation reduces the variability in clinical practice and improves outcomes.

Care Pathway for Total Hip Replacement

An innovative approach

Using clinical pathways to standardise care across the continuum—from the physicians’ office to the O.R., recovery post operation—improves communication among the care-giving team. The pathways are also a tool to educate and involve patients in their care, as they identify variation from expected outcomes and goals. Pathways improve the delivery of care to patients through encouraging early ambulation for those patients who undergo total hip replacement surgery while increasing clinical and organisational efficiency and revenue.

Managing End-of-Life Services

Experience from England

For years, charities, hospices and small teams of specialist nurses and doctors held the monopoly of responsibility for end-of-life care. Recently, Primary Care (Community) services across England began to realise the importance of a coordination point for the development and management of services.

Medical Tourism

Role of telemedicine

Medical tourism has become an important alternative for patients to get timely treatment and to seek desired medical care in foreign countries. Telemedicine can play a vital role in medical tourism through an evaluation of the involved business processes.

Medical Tourism in India

Seeking a differentiator

Incorporating Ayurveda into mainstream medicine could be an advantage to Indian hospitals in the medical tourism market.

Medical Tourism in India

Seeking a differentiator

India’s traditional medicine methods are popular abroad, and Ayurveda, in particular, is a huge draw for tourists travelling to India.

Medical Tourism in India

Seeking a differentiator

There is a void in mainstream healthcare which is being effectively complemented by Ayurveda. To that extent, appropriately integrating the two will enable delivery of comprehensive health are services to the market.

Health Tourism

The growth phenomenon

More affordable international travel and major advances in medical science, medical or health tourism is becoming less of a novelty and more of a global trend.

Knowledge Transfer and Human Resource Development in Medicine

CME and beyond

HR development could play a key role in providing quality healthcare. Care providers need to dedicate more resources to devise their HR policies and strategies.

Interruptions at the Workplace

A risk worth managing

While it is known that they can lead to errors, interruptions can also be imperative in high-risk domains such as healthcare, where patient safety and medical error reduction is now paramount. Human error theory can explain the concept of error and how errors occur at different levels in an organisation.

The Big Shift

Shifting to patient-centred care implies a re-think of every aspect of the patient’s journey through an episode of care from the patient’s perspective.

Meeting Diverse Needs

Patient-centred care means sensitivity and responsiveness to the cultural health beliefs and communication needs of patients.

The New Challenge

The challenges presented by this shift in focus can be overcome with strong leadership, clarity of purpose and a shared vision.

Global Health Landscape

Healthcare “beyond borders”

At a time when the global citizen is transforming how healthcare is delivered worldwide, there’s a need for a vision for delivering coordinated, high-quality and affordable care “beyond borders.”

Chronic Diseases

Prevention is better than cure

Regular physical exercise, healthier food and greater contact with the environment reduce the risks of chronic diseases and promote sustainable development.

Vision Care

The next step in comprehensive disease management Vision care plays an important role in the early detection and prevention of disease. The collaboration of evidence-based eye care with healthcare will have a positive impact on patient care and healthcare savings.

Six Sigma in Healthcare

Effective use of the Tool Box

The integration and coordination of the healthcare system’s process improvement tools, utilising Six Sigma concepts, Lean, Management Engineers and Information Services are the key to ensure that processes are first assessed and simplified before introducing anything new.

Lean and Six Sigma

Transforming healthcare

Lean and Six Sigma are powerful tools that help in making the leadership strong.

Transparency in Healthcare

Seeing is believing

The growing demand for transparency in healthcare is lifting the veil on this notoriously murky industry, but achieving transparency is a problematic journey that requires unprecedented collaboration across sectors within the health industries and adherence to world-class standards.

Patient Safety & Quality

Role of governance

Transparency in today's globalised healthcare world has impressed governance with the necessity of becoming increasingly accountable for patient safety by introducing quality standards and methods in order to retain a competitive edge and attract market share.

McHealthcare

Delivering consumer-driven healthcare

McDonald's consumer focus offers some important lessons for the healthcare providers to ponder as they are forced to transform into more consumer-driven organisations.

What can the Operating Room Learn from the Cockpit?

Though there are fundamental differences between flying an airliner and operating on the esophagus, simple airline lessons have a lot to offer.

Communication

Challenges and Opportunities during Handoffs

Variations in communication during patient handoffs cause a significant number of errors and "near misses" to occur, leading to adverse outcomes and sub-optimal care. The research interest in this area has been growing steadily.

NICE

Making the best use of healthcare resources

Several challenges lie ahead for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health.

Consumerism in Healthcare

Impact on business models and processes

Healthcare providers lag behind other industries as far as transformation to customer-driven or customerfocussed organisation is concerned. For this to happen, the customer needs to be equipped with information about products and services, which in turn necessitates collaboration along healthcare continuum.

Hospitals That Heal

Hospital design for the 21st century

The evidence-based design elements are quickly becoming mainstream in the design of US hospitals. Clearly, they are as applicable and relevant to hospitals the world over.

Improving Patient Safety

Focussing on non-clinical skills

The aviation industry has been aware of the role of humans in safety, specifically the possession of non-technical skills. As a result, these skills are taught and assessed. The healthcare profession has only recognised the corresponding role only recently and training in such skills is developing accordingly.

Corporate Social Responsibility in Private Hospitals

Being responsible means finding the right balance between what patients want and what governments can afford, and that staff are willing to provide the care needed. Doing this affects the entire hospital value chain. Doing this well, ensures the long term success that shareholders demand.

In the Passionate Pursuit of Healthcare Excellence

It's time for healthcare organisations to adopt drastic changes in their existing systems in order to reduce medical errors and deliver quality healthcare.

Leadership and Strategy in Hospitals

Hospital leaders should formulate and communicate vision for the institution. They should also continuously keep evolving the vision and motivate the followers to accomplish the mission.

Healthcare in New Zealand

Learning from complaints

Quality improvement measures made across the health sector as a result of complaints made to the Health and Disability Commissioner are evidence that investigating systemic failures in care, and recommending improvements, is making a positive difference in New Zealand.

Safe and Reliable Healthcare

Supporting strategy and structure

Effective leaders translate their strategic goals into a few simple statements that everyone working in the organisation can understand and to which they can align their behaviour.

Healthcare Insurance in Asia

Strengthening the insurer-healthcare provider relationship

As Asia’s MSPs evolve, so too will Asia’s health insurance sector—and the symbiotic relationship that binds the two together. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that Asia’s large hospital chains may one day seek to enter the health insurance industry themselves.

 

Lean in Healthcare

The difference between lean and the previous methods is that lean focuses on the entire healthcare process itself whereas traditionally healthcare has focused on separately scheduled individual activities.

Medical Tourism

Preparing for the challenge

Medical tourism offers great potential for Asian hospitals, but they need to be thoroughly prepared in order to make best use of the opportunity.

 

World-class via Accreditations

 

Medical tourism has played a catalytic role in making the Asian hospital strive for world-class quality standards.

 

A Healthy Market

Globally, the healthcare industry is under tremendous pressure to deliver high quality and efficient patient care.

China’s accession

China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 helped the country strengthen its ability to maintain strong economic growth rates...

The 2006 International Medical Instruments and Equipment Exhibition

will be held at the China international exhibition Center,
Beijing from 11 to 14

A Strategic Approach to Health Tourism

Entrepreneurial innovation was one of the main drivers of growth for the Malaysian economy in the 1990s. The private healthcare industry too did not lack in its initiatives.