Healthcare Organizations and Providers, Research Paper Example

Healthcare organizations and providers use economic tools to make strategic business decisions and reach the goal of providing optimal health care by using many of the strategies that corporations and marketing agencies do. It is occasionally necessary to treat healthcare as a business in order to ensure that hospitals and other healthcare facilities are able to take advantage of their resources and use them to deliver reasonable care. While this is a somewhat complex process for nurses and other healthcare professionals without a financial background, this type of business plan follows intuitively.

Firstly, it is important to emphasize the aspect of budgeting in healthcare. Many facilities are going bankrupt because they don’t have the money that is required to remain open. As a consequence, it is necessary to emphasize that healthcare organizations cannot spend more money than they have. To ensure that this does not happen, it is essential for the healthcare organization to pay close attention to the money they need to spend to ensure normal operations. If this is not possible, they will need to consider alternative methods of resource allocation.

Resource allocation is key because it could allow the healthcare organization to reduce costs without reducing service if it is done correctly. Resource allocation could also involve investing in more modern technologies, such as electronic health record systems, in order to reduce the amount of work done by all members of the team (Habib, 2010). This will allow nurses and other healthcare professionals to see more patients, which will increase productivity of the organization, require less staff, and therefore reduce costs. While there are many other methods that could be used to restructure healthcare facilities, it is often important to start with the easiest and most efficient changes before taking on larger projects.

References

Habib JL. (2010). EHRs, meaningful use, and a model EMR. Drug Benefit Trends, 22 (4): 99–101.

Menachemi N, Perkins RM, van Durme DJ, Brooks RG. (2006). Examining the adoption of electronic health records and personal digital assistants by family physicians in Florida. Inform Prim Care, 14(1): 1–9.