Effective health care leaders maintain simultaneous internal organizational and external industry environmental awareness. Leaders are challenged to focus upon vision, mission, strategic direction, goals and objectives while remaining mindful of emerging trends that may affect an organization’s viability. Monitoring the external environment for issues that may represent major challenges to an organization requires ongoing diligence. Health care administrators must identify and prioritize issues affecting their organizations. Furthermore, leaders must select methods and tools with which to analyze data for identification of potential solutions. You will have an opportunity to select a health care problem that is relevant to your career interests, and one that adds value to a current or future health care organization. Your discussion question will provide a supportive environment in which to practice problem solving related competencies for health care leaders.
For this assignment, you will identify a relevant, contemporary health care problem that may affect your current or future desired workplace (such as hospital, home health, hospice, or ambulatory clinic). The problem should be addressed in health care literature, and should be one for which data is readily available. Your selected problem should be specific enough that you can articulate the current state or baseline by describing major factors and how each factor is measured. For example, your selected problem may be analyzed by data that includes average length of stay (in days) and cost (dollars).
You will be challenged to provide a rationale for how the analysis of data is relevant to your career interests, as well as those of a health care organization. This assignment allows an opportunity to explore relevant issues in the health care industry and to apply your health care administration competencies in the first step toward analysis and recommendation of solutions.
Submission Requirements
Create a 3–10 page outline with at least six authoritative sources that will support the identification of a relevant problem, rationale for the selection of the problem, and the selections of appropriate measures. The goal is to be succinct yet substantive, and to provide sufficient detail for adequate coverage of your topic. Your goal is to have an outline that can easily be read by scanning. The material from this assignment will be condensed and utilized as part of your final PowerPoint presentation in Week 9.
- Identify a relevant problem and associated rationale for the selection for the problem.
- Describe, using an authoritative source, how the selected health care problem is assessed and measured for quality improvement purposes.
- Propose an industry measure of performance, such as a benchmark that pertains to the type of organization you have selected for problem analysis.
- Provide a bulleted list of the preliminary action plan steps to review the problem and propose solutions.
- (Example: Perform an online search, make a short list of relevant problems, select a problem, explore methods in literature to examine the problem, locate a possible tool for problem examination, explore with colleagues what method/tool they would use, explore with practicing professional what tool is preferred, identify best practices, select tool, apply tool, examine data, note trends, make recommendations from reading.)