ASSIGNMENT HELP | Describe the system that Newland hospital created by purchasing the primary care practices

Read Case Study 2 Clinics: Newland Hospital Chap 7, pg 358 in the text. Text

The questions require additional research and focus. Case study methodology requires you to be a detective, researcher, problem solver, and leader. Please review industry trends, journal articles, and your experience and insight that may lend credibility to the responses. Assume you are presenting your findings a board or group of investors. Finally, use your managerial, analytical, and critical thinking skills to provide insight and direction.

Question 1. Describe the system that Newland hospital created by purchasing the primary care practices. How do the concepts of optimization and suboptimization of a system apply?

Question 2. What reasons might explain why the practices are losing money?

3. Identify the economic value of the clinics to Newland Hospital. Identify the noneconomic value.

4. Outline a plan that applies CQI principles and concepts to improve the healthcare delivery system composed of primary care practices and Newland.

ANSWER

There are many ways through which a healthcare facility can improve access to its services. Acquisition of primary care practices or partnering with other retail or co-host pop-up clinics is one such strategy. Furthermore, this strategy helps improve the number of referral cases a hospital can report, especially in its inpatient services. In most cases, in-patient services are dependent on the quality that a medical facility provides, which consequently gives confidence for those seeking services. As much as such practices help improve the quality of care given, the economies of scale for such initiatives have to be carefully considered to avoid losses as is the case of Newland Hospital (West, Johnson & Jha, 2017).

A Description of the systems that Newland Hospital Created by Purchasing the Primary Care Practices

Primary care physicians are critical to the success of any healthcare facility. They help influence the higher quality of care, improve the healthcare population that seeks inpatient care and finally helps reduce per capita costs. Acquiring practices in primary care meant that the hospital intended to take the first step in coming up with a vertically aligned system. Theoretically, the acquired primary care practices were to help provide inpatients either directly from themselves or by use of referral cases specifically directed to specialists that are part of Newland’s medical team. To reap maximum benefit from the referrals, there is a need for Newland planning staff to understand which specialist referrals are made to and for which medical condition. In this regard, a referral spreadsheet will come in handy.

By assessing only, the primary care practices as a center for cost and profit, it implies that the healthcare provider doesn’t understand the optimization and sub-optimization concepts. This is because the practices have to be evaluated based on the contribution they make to the entire hospital since it is being viewed as a system. For this I mean, the practices in the primary care must undertake operations at a loss/negative to allow the whole system which is the hospital to optimize on its healthcare operations. The system (primary care) has to be perceived as a subset of the hospital which in this case can be described as the entire system.

Reasons that might explain why the practices are losing money Many reasons could explain why the practices are working at a loss. One probable reason, however, is that the practice could be undergoing bad management strategies. Such poor management ideals could be making the costs of managing the practices more than they should be. As highlighted before, the services of physicians are critical to any healthcare organization and hence an important consideration to make. It is however important that data is available to evaluate the effectiveness of the physicians. It makes no sense to pay them well in their contracts when the real picture shows that they are not as productive as they are meant to be (Gleeson et al., 2016). Their productivity should particularly…