Recommendations for Hospital Corporation of America Holdings

Introduction

After following Hospital Corporation of America Holdings financial statements since its creation, it has spent quite a bit of time making modifications to realign their financial and capital planning. Since the beginning, HCA has been used as a model for the hospital organization. It is time for HCA to realign their recommendations for the hospital all together. HCA has goals that need to be met to achieve future markers. Problem rises to which areas are of importance. The hospital must determine the key components of their financial planning and policies to meet their future objectives.

Assess the impact of the implementation

Leaders of today are continuously looking for ways find answers to problems that can affect the ability to perform cost-effective programs, continue with effective operations and services, staffing and training healthcare workers and back other healthcare ideas. Leader of HCA holdings should prepare for potential problems over the next few years to include regulations and policy changes, advancement in technology and medication, capital, education and ethical problems.

1. Healthcare cost rising because people are living longer and healthier lifestyles so, when healthcare concerns rise, so does the budget. Leaders must find other ways to battle the increase in the cost of care such as funding, donations and sponsors to aid in conducting research, establish programs and implement developments because of new changes.
2. Regulatory challenges, in healthcare increase the cost of offering health care services and care to fight these challenges, healthcare workers should participate in awareness and sharing of data often.
3. Therapeutic and technical development, challenges due to changes from an old way of doing office visits and prescreening requires management to look at ways of maintaining and accessing remote information from patients, be able to store data sufficiently, forecast the behavior of systems and provide information for continuous development. When management understands the structure, they can strategically plan for training the staff and patients which must be done regularly to keep up with the frequent changes in technology and medications of the future.
4. Challenges stemming from training and education for which proficiency is the key. It is essential for management to take steps in evaluating and developing employees in their specialized skill to remain proficient. In the upcoming year’s leader will need to be more laid-back and include patients more in their care, while offering new approaches to the current practice and making the patient and employees accessible to form a different way to speak to the patient without coming into the office.
5. Another important challenge in healthcare is ethical challenges, which make legal cost and malpractice insurance increase for the hospital, because of the serious nature of this matter leaders and employees’ behavior must be above accusations. The success of the hospital is depending of the behavior of the staff. (Becker’s Hospital Review, 2019. Para. 1-11).

The implementation of the recommendation

For the United States to flourish, people must be healthy and to improve the well-being of the people, the Department is at work with their public and private allies to make healthcare inexpensive, high quality and available to the patient it serves, it’s also making investments to support and expand to the healthcare personnel. The objective is to improve healthcare entirely for all patients across a lifetime.

An important factor of access to healthcare is being able to afford it. The increase cost in healthcare has caused financial stress for patients and their families.  Patients must pick between spending more of their wages on healthcare or paying for basic everyday needs. Without having timely access to healthcare services, patients are in danger of failing healthcare outcomes which can increase cost and make healthcare unavailable.

The U. S Department of Health and Human Services is dedicated decreasing healthcare cost for patients and trying to make it more affordable, also lessening the burden on government spending. HHS is giving guidance, resources, and flexibility for every state to come up with ideas for competitive, affordable insurance choices which meet their healthcare needs. The average household in 2016 healthcare spending rose to 6.2 percent, because of increase in healthcare cost.  Out-of-pocket expenses raised to 2.6 percent, doctors and medical services raised 6.3 percent, and medication cost grew 9.0 percent. The Department is encouraging higher-value and lower-cost healthcare choices with the following strategies:

1. Encourage the use of high-quality, lower-cost healthcare providers, where you see fit.
2. Encourage better coordination and productivity in post-acute care by discharging patients to their proper setting.
3. Help with being able to afford prescription medication, reconstructing the generic medication process and their use, benefits, and education.
4. The Department will continue to gather, evaluate and apply information to improve access to affordable healthcare by providing data on frequency, roots cause, and penalties of increase healthcare financial prices and community issues that worsen expenses.
5. Partner with all stakeholders to educate patients about their healthcare insurance choices, and how to select the best plan for themselves, and provide data to the patients on how they can access their health benefits.
6. Tracking movement with premiums, out-of-pocket expenses and maximums in health insurance coverage, deductibles.
7. Develop digital strategies to empower patients.
8. The Department is also trying to encourage preventive care to decrease medical expenses. such as promoting lifestyle changes and prevention along with severe case management to decrease the risk of diabetes and heart ailments in high-risk patients.
9. The Department is reinforcing how patient is making decisions and being upfront about the fee and cost of healthcare by comparing and using decision-making tools to help patients with their decision about their care, coverage, doctors, and treatment.
10. The government is working on incentives for healthcare quality and value-based care by planning, organization and management of services through the continuation of care to improve outcomes for patients with chronic illnesses.

The goal of the department is to decrease out-of-pocket cost of medication expenses, rising fraction of Medicare fee-for-Services cost tied to other payment models, while rising the percentage for Medicare dollars tied to other payment models including downsizing the risk.

Reinforcement of the United States healthcare system cannot be done without improving the quality and safety of United States citizens, because of the Medicare Access and Chip Reauthorization Act the department has different ways of offering enticements to doctors and other medical practitioners who give lucrative, high quality care to Medicare recipients, and for providers who participate in the alternative payment models, by rewarding cost over capacity.  The following strategies are being used as an incentive to provide safe, lucrative quality care:

1. Adapt a new payment system and service delivery model concept for decreasing healthcare costs by implementing best practices, boosting care coordination, and supporting evidence-based care, and improving access to suitable preventive services for Medicare recipients to improve the understanding of acceptable preventive benefits especially with patients who health may be in jeopardize.
2. Sponsor research by identifying the differences in quality healthcare delivery because of situations outside the control of the doctor.
3. The Department continues to increase patient safety and decrease adverse reactions such as healthcare-associated infections and harm because of medication throughout the healthcare system by addressing gaps in quality and safety hazards for health related issues.
4. Come up with ways to stop health related infections and fight antibiotic resistance medications.
5. Turn data and evidence into everyday tools, training and other means to stead up the progression to improve quality and patient safety.
6. The Department is working to influence technology resolutions to support safe quality care by exchanging data flow to patients, doctors, payers, and others can resourcefully send, receive, and evaluate information across all the clinic’s settings.
7. Carry out useful health information technology tools to support the doctor and patient decision making, and to upkeep workflow for healthcare workers.
8. The organization is planning to work toward a team approach toward care by working with the healthcare system and stakeholders to assist with spreading the word about evidence-based practices, and the approach used foe new ideas to aid in patient care.
9. The Department is investing in patients, clients, families and other caregivers to help with the use of patient-centered care by emerging and applying programs to increase the quality of care and services available to them.
10. The organization will continue to gather, evaluate and apply information to improve access to quality healthcare and by applying updated policies, process, and outcome’s improvements through the Medicare Payment Program.

The primary goal of the Hospital Corporation of America is to increase reporting in the antibiotic stewardship programs to be in compliant with the Center of Disease Control, decrease readmission rate to hospital for Medicare-Medicaid participants, increase patient safety by decreasing harm to the patients.

The appropriate use of personal health services to attain the best health outcomes means access to health services. The Department of Health and Human Services is working to decrease the high cost of care, accessibility of services and lack proficiency of care. Strategies used are:

1. Suggest rules or review regulations that are constant with the law and increase the availability of temporary and short-term insurance excused from certain federal insurance mandates and guidelines.
2. Encourage access to high-quality and affordable healthcare for every United States citizen, which include the right to choose and decrease premiums. Healthcare reform stresses cost transparency of healthcare doctors, allowing patients to shop for the best price of care, insurance options that are best for them and their family.
3. Helping patient access ground-breaking medical products by showing patient-centered analysis for health coverage and making data available about health coverage at all times

The performance goal of access to care is to track the number of patients who receive direct services through help and available resources, increase patient and family involvement by improving the shared decision-making process and increase telehealth encounters to patient who lives in rural areas. (HHS.GOV. U.N. Para. 1-70).

Forecasted SWOT

Haadsma. C.R. suggested (.2015. P. 68-75) a balanced scorecard explains Hospital Corporation of America performance measures and serve as a routine outline for the implementation of the hospital’s mission statement, it also specifies several areas for HCA to improve operations and focus on all areas of the hospital. Three recommendations, areas of interest to the hospital are:

1. Opportunity to hire more permanent employees at service’s lines with available possibilities.
2. Use inpatient services more proficiently.
3. Bring technology up to date to compete with non-profit healthcare workers.

In the case of other small clinics, HCA holding’s employee doctors without recruiting them as permanent employees. It is recommended that HCA look at increasing yearly salaries and income wages to keep doctors and keep patients while providing the best care. Increase in patients can lead to larger profits. The mission of HCA holdings is to raise patient satisfaction by reviewing the average days a patient stays in the hospital, volume reached on normally any time. Lastly, HCA holdings can be more competitive with advancement in technology.

Strategic communication plan

In an article by Grossman. D. (2018. Para. 1-24). Hospital Corporation of America uses communication plans for many issues, which these plans can turn strategies into action, aiding employees with changes, report significant problems, handling delicate staff issues, forming an operation to decrease safety issues Whatever the message you are trying to convey to your employees, your agenda for developing the plan should include:

1. Provide an overview of the problems and the need for communication.
2.  Determine the desired results you’re trying to achieve.
3. Define the audience you want to reach.
4. Base on the target audience, you want to outline the key message you want your audience to receive.
5. Decide on your plan and what network and strategies you’ll use.
6. Measure the hospital improvements.
7. Set a desired timeline.

Press release

Hospital Corporation of America Holdings, one of the leading healthcare facilities that have over 180 plus hospitals and about 2000 locations of care in 21 states throughout the United States of America and Kingdom, has publicized the development of a process driven system in real-time that can quickly recognizepatients’ with sepsis to save lives. The use of this new technology has been used on 2.5 million patients along with factual clinical interventions and has saved about 8,000 lives in the last few years.

Sepsis can cause the body to go into total body failure and roughly 270,000 people die from it every year and is the leading cause of death in patients that lack heart problems and eleventh leading cause of death in the United States. Sepsis can mimic other diseases and can be a challenge, early detection and treatment can increase survival rates.

HCA Holdings SPOT, technology uses the names of dogs because it spots sepsis in ways people can’t. This system was created by healthcare and information technology specialists using information from a lot of hospitalizations, SPOT can monitor vitals, labs, nursing notes and other information that can update treatment and identifies serious data in the patient’s medical records.  The algorithmic can detect clinical workflow and alert the staff of any changes in the patient’s state, so appropriate action can be taken. The SPOT algorithm uses data from 31 million patient care events and is extremely sensitive and accurate.

One of the initiatives of HCA is to pull information at-scale and immediately discover and improve patient care. The healthcare clinical and data science teams are working continuously to improve the algorithm by merging experiences and results with methods of machine learning and false intelligence to improve the clinic efficiency.  HCA is also implementing SPOT-ER which should start this year, it is also planning to use machine learning rapidly to detect other serious life-threatening illnesses.

HCA has a nationwide medical information warehouse that collects data from electronic medical records and provide the ability to accumulate and evaluate information now and uses tools like SPOT that can provide legal data to caregivers. Another study such as the active bathing to eliminate infection has shown that antiseptic wash reached a thirty-one percent decrease in bloodstream poisons with forty percent decrease in antibiotic-resistant bacteria which does not involve an intensive care unit patient which has a central drip line or lumbar drains. The Center for Disease Control was in the MRSA and ABATE study for which now standard for best practices. (HCA Healthcare, 2019).

Conclusion

I believe it is important for the Hospital Corporation of America Holdings to introduce several programs to improve the quality of care we deliver. Many of these programs depend on patient involvement in their healthcare to achieve outcomes. The different efforts to improve, patient engagement show that additional research is required in different ways and methods for actual engagement from different patients and healthcare settings and research are necessary for an effective measurement of the patient therefore to prevent problems as they occur and continuous measure improvement.  The hospital has learned that patient engagement rather used separately or together will have better outcomes and decrease costs.

Reference

• Becker’s Hospital Review, (2019). Five top challenges affecting healthcare leaders in the future Retrieved from https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-management-administration/five-top-challenges-affecting-healthcare-leaders-in-the-future.html
• Grossman, D. (2018). How to Create an Internal Communications Plan in 7 Steps Retrieved from https://www.yourthoughtpartner.com/blog/internal-communications-plan
• Haadsma, C.R. (2015). HOSPITAL CORPORATION OF AMERICA: AN ANALYSIS OF THE FINANCIAL STATEMENTS OF HCA HOLDINGS, INC. Retrieved from http://thesis.honors.olemiss.edu/668/1/Reformatted_Thesis.pdf
• HCA Healthcare. (2019). HCA Healthcare Using Algorithm Driven Technology to Detect Sepsis Early and Help Save 8,000 Lives Retrieved from https://investor.hcahealthcare.com/press-release/hca-healthcare-using-algorithm-driven-technology-detect-sepsis-early-and-help-save-800
• HHS.gov. (U.N.) Strategic Goal 1: Reform, Strengthen, and Modernize the Nation’s Healthcare System Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/about/strate