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Healthcare leaders and administrators For the field of healthcare administration, healthcare leaders and administrators may contribute to the public policy process by advocating for and implementing policy changes to enhance delivery goals for an HSO while also benefitting the HSO’s patient population. Yet, within the public policy process, how do healthcare leaders best engage in the process?
There are four steps in the public policy process: 1) identifying a problem, 2) formulating a policy, 3) implementing the policy change, and 4) evaluating the result. While the steps identified here are simplified, they do present a cycle or sequence that healthcare administration leaders may act upon to influence public policy. Consider how healthcare leaders might have contributed to the public policy that brought about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). At what step in the process might have healthcare administration professionals contributed their perspective in designing or implementing this law?
For this Discussion, review the weekly resources and consider how healthcare leaders might influence the public policy process. Consider what healthcare leaders must do to maximize the business and healthcare delivery goals of an HSO.
Post a description of how a healthcare administration leader might influence the public policy process to the advantage of a health services organization or other professional association. Be specific and provide examples. Healthcare leaders and administrators
Discussion
Continue the Discussion to 2 of your colleagues and describe a personal experience where you, as a current or future healthcare administrator, might have engaged in the public policy process. If you do not have any personal experience, describe how you might assert your role as a healthcare administrator in the public policy process. Healthcare leaders and administrators
Each Colleagues 250 words or more (Colleague 1 250 words, Colleague 2 250 words, Total 500 words)
Colleague 1
In the public policy process, healthcare administrators can best engage within the process by sharing their vision and mission about the right actions to improve healthcare administration to benefit the HSO’s patient population (Christianson, Leatherman, & Sutherland, 2008). Healthcare administrators could also share their experiences and provide proper programs in improving the healthcare administration process and contribute resources, including financial and human resources, to assist in public policy design programs. Such action will ensure that the healthcare administrators are proactively involved in creating effective HSO policies.
Furthermore, Healthcare administrators can contribute to designing and implementing the law at the second step of formulating a policy. They are highly creative and informative about the need to draft acceptable HSO care policies with the capacity and ability to recommend proper actions to formulate the healthcare policies. Healthcare administrators also have a significant influence on the decisions made within the healthcare sector. They can maximize their leadership influence and abilities to shape the design and implementation of the healthcare delivery goals of an HSO (Brownson, Chriqui, & Stamatakis, 2009). Thus, the healthcare administrators had a maximum impact on the second step of formulating the health policy relating to the HSO.
Brownson, R. C., Chriqui, J. F., & Stamatakis, K. A. (2009). Understanding evidence-based public health policy. American Journal of Public Health, 99(9), 1576-1583.
Christianson, J. B., Leatherman, S., & Sutherland, K. (2008). Lessons from evaluations of purchaser pay-for-performance programs: A review of the evidence. Medical Care Research and Review, 65(6 supplement), 5S-35S.
Colleague 2
Public policy process plays a vital role in the general wellness and safety of a population. Based on the given needs of a community, public health policy establishes clear goals and solutions towards total health. Public policy in healthcare affects physician and patient choices. In many ways it may limit choices for healthcare administration leadership. Some issues depend on the laws enacted to enable either a single-payer system or that mixed with a private-payer system. In each case, the systems attain some cost controls through means such as gatekeepers, long wait lists, authorization processes, national fee schedules, complex coding schemes, or placing physicians on salary (Nuwer, 2013). No one system has proven completely satisfactory, and each has its advantages when it comes to public policies. There are many factors that contribute to the escalating costs of care that lead to many healthcare public policies to constrain costs. Initiatives to incentivize preventive actions are a more positive step, but ones that are difficult to define in detail. For health care administration, public health policy is determined by a process of consultation, negotiation, and research, which leads to a plan of action that sets out a vision of identified public health goals (Martin, 2008). This influences the public policy process for an health service organization is that public health law must be sufficiently flexible to provide a vehicle for public health intervention in unforeseeable circumstances, and the incorporation of strategic policy into the legal framework of health protection might serve both to enhance the status of public health policy and to provide law which better reflects the realities of public health practice. The healthcare administration leader must focus on providing top quality of care that meets the needs of the surrounding community.
References
Martin R. (2008). Law, and Public Health Policy. International Encyclopedia of Public Health,
30–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012373960-5.00236-7
Nuwer M. R. (2013). Public policy and healthcare systems. Handbook of clinical neurology, 118,
277–287. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-53501-6.00023-8