Healthcare Quality

Quality Healthcare Services
Student’s Name
Institution
Quality Initiatives for John Kim’s Hospital
Here at John Kim’s hospital, we are strongly focused on enhancing the quality of medical care we offer to our patients. Following recent complains that our services are deteriorating over time we are strongly focusing on regaining our consumer trust. The reason for high mortality for the previous year was due to an increased number of critical patients we receive from smaller and peer hospital. Our current central quality initiatives are to provide safe medical treatment to our patients, the most current state of art technological equipment for treatment and thirdly, to provide real-time treatment services to our patients.
Patient safety
Safety of the patient is our main concern here at John Kim’s Hospital. It is the primary responsibility of every patient-care personnel to report or address any phenomenon that undermines our patients’ safety and puts them at the risk of accidental injuries. The services offered at this facility meet the smartcards set by the Medical and Medicaid Services (CMS). Every day, we challenge our healthcare teams to adhere to secure ways of administering quality healthcare services to our clients.
Efficiency in our facility
We have a robust and well-integrated database which enables our healthcare workers to access the patient information in real time. It stores all material information which includes the previous medical history for our nurses and doctors to access it in real time.

The database also helps the management to deduce important statistical data that can aid in evaluating various treatment techniques based on readmissions, mortality, and complications associated with the techniques.
Modern available treatment facility
We employ modern evidence-based practices to provide the most qualified healthcare services and to enhance our customer experience. Our quality improvement plan (QIP) requires us to track mortalities, readmission and any arising complication that can be directly associated with a new treatment technique. This is made possible by our information management systems.
Factors that Would Help Reduce Healthcare Cost at John Kim’s Hospital
Quality healthcare is a fundamental aspect of healthcare services in any healthcare facility. Therefore, before lowering the cost of treatment, the management should focus on maintaining the quality of medical services they offer. In order to lower the healthcare cost while keeping standards, John Kim’s Hospital should do the following.
Transparency on the real cost of medicines and other equipment as well as fragmentation of medical plan for the clients can significantly enhance the convenience of our clients. The cost of medical equipment and drugs should be put into consideration when determining the aggregate cost of individual treatment. It should be done with an aim to lower the cost of various treatment techniques.
The management should come up with treatment options that best suit our clients’ needs and financial capability. Also, the clinical condition of a patient should be considered in determining a medication plan. This increases the convenience of the clients in terms of financial capability.
John Kim’s Hospital should use its scale to influence sound healthcare reforms that aim at reducing healthcare cost for patients. Also, having a considerable number of branches in various states, it should focus on influencing and advocating for integrated federal and state healthcare policies governing healthcare insurance programs. The move will harmonize the cost of treatment for all its clients irrespective of their geographical locations (Carayon, Wetterneck, Rivera-Rodriguez, Hundt, Hoonakker, Holden, & Gurses, 2014). Another important proposition in conjunction with that is for the management to support and influence various states to come up with viable favorable insurance exchange policies.
Difference between Single Government System and Free Market System
Quality management of healthcare in any given state is a fundamental issue that requires in most cases government intervention due to its costly and sensitive nature. The Free market healthcare system allows both single payer and private payers to subscribe to their platform (Mossialos, Wenzl, Osborn, & Sarnak, 2016). The single government system, on the other hand, requires only a single payer conveying stores for health insurance coverage. Some of the public insurance funded by the US government includes the Medicare and Medicaid, whereas privately owned include employer-sponsored insurance plan.
Free market health care systems increase competition among health insurance providers as each of the firms compete to provide the best healthcare insurance packages (Mossialos, Wenzl, Osborn, & Sarnak, 2016). As a result, the premium for these packages keeps rising thus rising healthcare costs. The single government system, on the other hand, being the sole provider creates no competition. It stimulates healthcare facilities to focus on improving the quality of healthcare services.
Having a single government system will benefit everyone in the long-run since the services would be obtained at a cheaper cost as well as quality improvement. Other studies argue that competition created by the free market system improves the quality of healthcare services (Mossialos, Wenzl, Osborn, & Sarnak, 2016). Quality and convenience for high-income earners increases, whereas the services that the low-income earners can afford to become low. This phenomenon leads to a general upward shift in healthcare cost.
The Common Healthcare Laws
Providing quality healthcare is a fundamental requirement for any healthcare facility. There are common healthcare laws that still hold in the 21st century, despite most of them being dropped due to the dynamic healthcare system. These laws include:
Medicare Rule
The Medicare rule requires that any piece of information concerning a patient should be kept confidential between the healthcare facility and the patient (Hall, & Bobinski, 2014). Confidentiality is a part of healthcare, and here at John Kim’s Hospital, we ensure that we keep our client information safe and confidential. When patients realize that their information can lead to an unauthorized party, they may withhold crucial information thus compromising their treatment. Our database has robust security protocol, which includes strong administrators’ and security firewalls that ensure the security of data pertaining to our patients is not compromised.
The patient bill rights
This law requires that a patient is made aware of the treatment to undergo drugs as well as surgical procedures and give consent (Hall, & Bobinski, 2014). If they are unable to do so due to the severity of their clinical condition, their next of kin can give informed consent. The patient or the next of kin also have a right to refuse the entire treatment or a certain medical procedure. The patient bill of rights still holds in our company in ensuring the quality of our services is rendered exemplary. Quality treatment includes doing the right thing the right way, and the way is how our client wants.
Health professional education
This law requires that healthcare personnel undergo healthcare training before engaging in healthcare exercise (Hall, & Bobinski, 2014). Healthcare providers are required to gain core competencies in their specified areas of specialization which enables them to achieve the necessary level of outcomes. John Kim’s hospital is highly reputable regarding qualified staff and quality service delivery. It is the reason why smaller and peer healthcare facilities recommend their sickest patients to be admitted here.
Benefits Accruing to John Kim’s Hospital as a Result of Quality Healthcare Services
Quality of healthcare services is the likelihood of an individual or group of patients to achieve the desired outcomes after undergoing a treatment procedure (Mosadeghrad, 2014). It defines the intricate relationship between the cost of treatment, results achieved and the anticipated results. Many healthcare facilities focus on gaining value for money, but here at John Kim’s Hospital, we focus on administering quality treatment to all our patients regardless of the cost of treatment. In essence, we focus on developing the maximum positive outcome for any given treatment procedure. Our QRP requires that we carry out a follow up of up to 12 months for critical cases, and also we solicit patients’ feedback soon after the treatment. These measures have always enhanced our relations with our clients. We, as a dedicated facility to provide quality healthcare services, have enjoyed the following.
Client satisfaction
Most of our clients are always satisfied with the treatment we offer here at John Kim’s Hospital. We tend to discharge our patient later that any healthcare facility would, which enables us to monitor any progress and possibility of improvement. As a result, we have witnessed low mortality in recent years. Patients discharged earlier tend to worsen due to non-care, and thus we encourage our patients to stay longer for them to get the necessary care.
Good client relationship
When clients achieve the desired clinical outcome, they develop a good relationship with our healthcare personnel at a personal level. This generally builds a good reputation for the healthcare firm. At John Kim’s Hospital, we focus on our clients’ satisfaction through actively soliciting feedback and adhering to our follow-up program. Our clients, in turn, advertise us out there, and as a result, we get more clients.
Improved customer base
As more and more patients are referred to our facility when they become critically ill, it becomes universally known that we can handle critical clinical conditions more effective than our competitors. This has built a good reputation for us, and the number of clients is progressively increasing.
Plan for Protecting Patient Information
Our patients’ information security is our fundamental duty of all time in our daily operations. Every day we challenge our health workers, especially in our IT department to always keep patients’ data safe and secure. In our Quality Assessment Plan (QAP), we have come up with a plan that complies with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards. We came up with the following strategies to ensure that we secure and keep safe our client’s data.
Ensuring the organization is covered
John Kim Hospital is a healthcare institution legally covered by a requirement of HIPAA standards.
Leadership domain
To effectively address patient security issues, we have an administrative body which works with the IT department to deal with all matters concerning patients’ data security.
Document for process findings and actions
As directed by CMS to have a document to attest compliance with HIPAA standards. It includes information such as the reason why we have the above security measures in place.
Risk analysis
The patients’ data security leadership domain evaluates high-security threats as well as determining the current security matters and whether they meet the legal threshold for data security.
Action plan
This indicates what to expect in the event of a security breach and the relevant measures to mitigate future occurrences and dealing with any future occurrences.
Future prevention of occurrence of data security breach
It includes a thorough analysis of the previous data security breaches and mitigation strategies to protect against impending security breaches.
References
Carayon, P., Wetterneck, T. B., Rivera-Rodriguez, A. J., Hundt, A. S., Hoonakker, P., Holden, R., & Gurses, A. P. (2014). Human factors systems approach to healthcare quality and patient safety. Applied Ergonomics, 45(1), 14-25.
Hall, M. A., & Bobinski, M. A. (2014). Health care law and ethics. Wolters Kluwer Law & Business.
Mosadeghrad, A. M. (2014). Factors influencing health care service quality. International journal of health policy and management, 3(2), 77.
Mossialos, E., Wenzl, M., Osborn, R., & Sarnak, D. (2016). 2015 international profiles of health care systems. Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health.