Developing Organizational Policies and Practices. Competing needs arise within any organization as employees seek to meet their targets and…
Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Introduction
Competing needs arise within any organization as employees seek to meet their targets and leaders seek to meet company goals. As a leader, successful management of these goals requires establishing priorities and allocating resources accordingly.
Within a healthcare setting, the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients are often in conflict. Mandatory overtime, implementation of staffing ratios, use of unlicensed assisting personnel, and employer reductions of education benefits are examples of practices that might lead to conflicting needs in practice.
Leaders can contribute to both the problem and the solution through policies, action, and inaction. In this Assignment, you will further develop the white paper you began work on in Module 1 by addressing competing needs within your organization.
To Prepare:
- Review the national healthcare issue/stressor you examined in your Assignment for Module 1, and review the analysis of the healthcare issue/stressor you selected.
- Identify and review two evidence-based scholarly resources that focus on proposed policies/practices to apply to your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
- Reflect on the feedback you received from your colleagues on your Discussion post regarding competing needs.
The Assignment (4-5 pages):
Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Add a section to the paper you submitted in Module 1. The new section should address the following:
- Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
- Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
- Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.
- Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance the competing needs of resources, workers, and patients, while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies. Be specific and provide examples.
- Cite evidence that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and/or the policies, and provide two scholarly resources in support of your policy or practice recommendations.
- Due to the nature of this assignment, your instructor may require more than 7 days to provide you with quality feedback.
By Day 7 of Week 3
Submit your revised paper.
Submission and Grading Information
To submit your completed Assignment for review and grading, do the following:
- Please save your Assignment using the naming convention “WK3Assgn+last name+first initial.(extension)” as the name.
- Click the Week 3 Assignment Rubric to review the Grading Criteria for the Assignment.
- Click the Week 3 Assignment link. You will also be able to “View Rubric” for grading criteria from this area.
- Next, from the Attach File area, click on the Browse My Computer button. Find the document you saved as “WK3Assgn+last name+first initial.(extension)” and click Open.
- If applicable: From the Plagiarism Tools area, click the checkbox for I agree to submit my paper(s) to the Global Reference Database.
- Click on the Submit button to complete your submission.
- Due to the nature of this assignment, your instructor may require more than 7 days to provide you with quality feedback
Grading Criteria
To access your rubric:
Week 3 Assignment Rubric
Check Your Assignment Draft for Authenticity
To check your Assignment Draft for Authenticity:
Submit your Week 3 Assignment draft and review the originality report
Submit Your Assignment by Day 7 of Week 3
To participate in this Assignment:
Week 3 Assignment
Next Module
Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Solution
Competing needs influence how healthcare leaders strive to allocate resources for various programs. In most cases, the competing needs result in conflicting decisions, leading to poor process outcomes. This paper discusses competing needs in implementing and adopting integrated health information and service systems, policies that influence the adoption of health information systems, and recommendations on the best practices to balance competing needs.
Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
The two competing needs that influence healthcare information and service integration include management/staff engagement and resources requirement. Influential individuals and groups play critical roles in the development of organizational policies and practices. To develop effective policies and practices, it is crucial to consult influential individuals and groups to ensure that proposed policies and practices get approval and necessary funding for establishment and maintenance.
Internal experts or specialists, executives, and senior management groups are considered influential in organizations. However, contacted consultants can impede organizational policies and practices due to conflicting ideologies in developing strategies.
To facilitate the integration of health information and services, there is a need for resources that require financial incentives. Organizational resources such as existing systems, skill set, infrastructure, and financial resources are essential factors affecting policy and program decision-making. Information systems required hardware and software elements, which are mostly expensive and require the financial capability to install and maintain.
Cresswell et al. (2017) argue that health information systems require financial and human investments to facilitate successful implementation and optimization. In healthcare, adopting health information systems involves employing specialists such as nurse informaticists and IT experts to evaluate and maintain such systems. For example, data collection, analysis and reporting systems, associated hardware, and routine maintenance practices require a financial investment.
Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
Organizational leadership and employee integration can influence the effective implementation of information and service integration in healthcare settings. Organizational leadership’s support to implement a proposed information and service integration initiative is demonstrated in leadership commitment. For instance, leadership commitment to corporate initiatives is exemplified provision of incentives and contracting specialists to ensure the initiative is successful.
Equally, leaders can facilitate funding to ensure equitable distribution of funds to the various aspects of information and service integration. Funding promotes interprofessional teamwork and health promotion necessary for the sustainability of the proposed changes.
Employee integration involves frameworks set in place to guide the participation of every stakeholder in significant decisions and initiatives in an organization. In essence, employees embody the organizational culture and ways of thinking and working, often affected by new policies and programs. For information system implementation to be successful, there is a need to promote coordination across organizational departments, leadership levels, and low-level employees.
In my organization, onboarding and training policies will be crucial in integrating new and old employees to the operation ability of the adopted health systems. The onboarding process includes enrolling resources for new systems to ensure that employees have knowledge and resources for the new systems.
For instance, the integration of physicians is a gateway to an integrated system since they influence the creation and maintenance of universal patient electronic records. Thus, an organization should engage physicians in leading roles and inboard participation to promote system leverage.
Critique the policy for ethical considerations, and explain the policy’s strengths and challenges in promoting ethics.
Ethical responsibility supersedes and is not often consistent with a person’s and professional values. From a critical perspective, individual identity and autonomy, responsibility to keep data confidential, and the need to produce associated clinical data to facilitate evidence-based care. Integration affects professional identity by posing a challenge to defined realms of medical jurisdiction (McKeown et al., 2019).
In most instances, clinicians view information and service integration in healthcare and the associated practice changes as desirable and crucial. However, the integration of information and services in healthcare offers creates a barrier to clearly defined realms of medical responsibility.
Patient privacy concerns have dominated ethical considerations for the adoption of integrated information and service systems in healthcare. EHRs have been shown to improve healthcare by facilitating access to patient’s clinical data across multiple providers, reducing medical errors, efficient information exchange, and effective collaboration.
However, the widespread sharing of medical information enabled by electronic channels may contradict patients’ values, nursing standards, and ethical code of practice regarding patient’s privacy (Vemuri & Dunn, 2017). The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) imposes legal restrictions on the release of protected health information (PHI). However, these restrictions are intended to protect patients from unapproved access to medical information while allowing healthcare institutions and personnel to access and share information.
Recommend one or more policy or practice changes designed to balance resources, workers, and patients’ competing needs while addressing any ethical shortcomings of the existing policies. Be specific and provide examples.
The most effective policy change for adopting and implementing healthcare information and service integration is the equitable distribution of financial resources throughout the organization. Typically, different healthcare facets, including administration, human resources, among other factions, requires financial incentives to run.
Considering the complexity and the need to integrate the various aspects of a healthcare setting, dividing financial resources on a need basis will ensure that all requirements are well supported, thus implementing and maintaining a new system. In this essence, workers will be effectively compensated for their work, and patient needs will be met while guarding unauthorized access to patient’s clinical data. In most cases, poor remuneration to frontline clinical personnel can contribute to ineffective management of patient databases, predisposing them to access by an unauthorized party.
Cite evidence that informs the healthcare issue/stressor and the policies, and provide two scholarly resources supporting your policy or practice recommendations.
The continual high-level commitment of organizational leadership is required to guarantee that appropriate resources are committed to supporting optimization initiatives for system deployment (Cresswell et al., 2017). Such administration must promote ongoing and consistent development by adhering to the transformative vision, identifying priority areas, and supporting relevant financial allocation activities.
Adopting and implementing an effective health information system needs healthcare providers to establish appropriate human resource and governance frameworks constantly. Throughout the implementation process, it is critical to realize that priorities may shift and that flexibility is required. Leadership also establishes guidelines for the use of new systems to preserve patient information.
The role of employees in keeping their ID to themselves, logging off compute systems, and using their ID to access computer systems are crucial guidelines that an organization can adopt to ensure clinical records are free from unauthorized access.
On the other hand, the integration of employees at all levels of clinical health management facilitates the effective implementation of proposed health systems. For example, the project teams, including informaticists and clinical analysts, have the organizational skills crucial for system enhancement (Cresswel et al., 2017).
Therefore, involving employees at all levels of management specialty is essential for the success of the health information system. However, the consistent advancement necessitates competent skills and training existing staff to optimize the adopted system. Skillsets, including technical ability on adopted health systems and organizational change capability, ensure that new systems are optimally used.
Studies have shown that allocating limited resources in healthcare institutions presents a significant challenge due to competing needs. According to Bodina et al. (2017), appropriate resource allocation is crucial for effective health management and determines administrative areas of priority and the associated importance.
On the other hand, Harris et al. (2017) argue that resource allocation is crucial when introducing new systems into existing healthcare infrastructure. These two articles show that effective adoption of a health information system is supported by efficient resource allocation for its operation and maintenance.
Conclusion
Implementation and adoption of integrated information and service systems in health care are on the rise. The reason for the upsurge lies in the benefits that the systems provide healthcare providers and consumers. The two organizational aspects competing for similar needs as integrated health systems include staff engagement and resources requirement. Integrated health systems are operated by staff and require hardware and software resources, all of which are limited.
Equally, integrated health systems are influenced by organizational leadership’s commitment through support in terms of resource allocation and employee training. Moreover, integrated health systems are criticized due to the associated ethical aspects such as lack of autonomy, professional identity, and confidentiality of clinical data. The likely practice changes to mitigate competing needs are allocating equal financial resources depending on needs across different programs in a healthcare setting.
References
Bodina, A., Pavan, A., & Castaldi, S. (2017). Resource allocation criteria in a hospital. Journal of preventive medicine and hygiene, 58(2), E184. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5584089/
Cresswell, K. M., Bates, D. W., & Sheikh, A. (2017). Ten key considerations for the successful optimization of large-scale health information technology. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 24(1), 182-187. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocw037
Harris, C., Allen, K., Waller, C., & Brooke, V. (2017). Sustainability in health care by allocating resources effectively (SHARE) 3: examining how resource allocation decisions are made, implemented, and evaluated in a local healthcare setting. BMC health services research, 17(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-017-2207-2
McKeown, A., Cliffe, C., Arora, A., & Griffin, A. (2019). Ethical challenges of integration across primary and secondary care: a qualitative and normative analysis. BMC medical ethics, 20(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-019-0386-6
Vemuri, M., & Dunn, L. B. (2017). Ethical and Clinical Issues in Integrated Care Settings: Patient Privacy Concerns and Electronic Health Records. Focus, 15(3), 301-305. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.focus.20170018
