Efficiency in Provision of Healthcare Services - Essay Example

Efficiency in Provision of Healthcare services Efficiency in the provision of healthcare services Controlling the expenditure in healthcare is usually a political milestone for any government. A large amount of government revenue is used up from the treasury in a bid to meet the dynamic healthcare needs of any population. Thus, efficiency becomes of vital importance primarily because the growing needs have to be met with a limited amount of resources. National healthcare principles such as free and accessible health have to be met and this further alleviates the direness of the improvement in the efficiency in the use of resources. The application of economic theory to healthcare resource management is the primary method of ensuring efficiency in the management of resources. These resources include physical (hospitals and dispensaries), human (doctors and nurses), and financial (monetary allocations from the national budget). The steps that are involved in this paper will follow the PDSA cycle in a bid to simplify how the process of improving efficiency should be done. Plan Establishing the optimum amount to be allocated into healthcare is the single most important issue to address in the planning process. The process entails establishing what fraction of the national budget should be channeled towards the provision of healthcare services without compromising the other sectors that the government is involved in funding like education and national security. The second issue that should be addressed on this planning level is establishing how to allocate the resources in such a fashion that there is proper use of the resources for maximum output. For instance, how much money should be allocated to preventive healthcare or medical research? The final issue in this planning stage would be establishing the plausible outcomes desired and weigh them against the challenges anticipated in meeting the goals. Do This step would involve implementing components of the plan outlined above. Establishing the optimum amount of resources invested and the level of results obtained. The process here would involve a keen study into the medical practices and techniques present in the system. It would aid in the assessment of the effectiveness of two things or practices that serve to achieve similar purposes. From an economic perspective, there should be a reduction in cost as well as an increase in the effectiveness of the practice or drug used. For instance, a more economically viable drug is less costly and most effective. In this respect, it would be correct to infer that effectiveness is a factor of both the clinical and economic aspects of healthcare provision. This is because of the scarcity of government resources that warrant for only the implementation of effective practices. Study Here the outcomes of the plan are put under scrutiny and one works towards testing the validity of the plan and establishing the problems that were encountered during the implementation of the plan. In this respect, there is the necessity to establish whether services provided in the healthcare are clinically effective. Services or strategies in the plan that do not achieve the result of improving health, preventing a disease, treating, or detecting it should be done away with. Medical procedures are considered inappropriate if they have no financial benefits or the results are not desirable to the patient’s health. The ineffective practices should be considered for elimination, as this is where resources such as funding get lost through. Some of the challenges that one is bound to encounter in the process of establishing a plan that has efficiency is considering costs in relation to benefits. This is simply because the efficient allocation of resources is born out of choices that have moral, ethical, and societal aspects to it as well. The Assessment of the efficiency of medical treatments and practice is supposed to be conducted to ensure that priorities are set right when it comes to allocation of resources. Marginal benefits as well as clear-cut advantages should be considered when assessing how effective a project has been (Institute of Medicine 2001). Taking a macro-economic perspective as well would be beneficial to the study, as it would determine the amount of resources that need to be allocated to healthcare by the government. This is however challenging, as there exists no particular standard to how much of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is going to be allocated to health care. Act This being the last step, multiple considerations have to be factored in for achieving the ultimate goals of establishing a functioning and improved healthcare provision system that is both efficient and effective. For this step to be implemented a system approach is called for; the first would be the increase of effectiveness and efficiency which would alleviate funding problems experienced by public health insurance systems. Secondly, more effective methods of delivering goods and services will directly improve the quality of healthcare. The third is that more health care provision contributes to an improvement in the health of the populations. Lastly, a more efficient health care system will make the system ultimately more efficient. Conclusion The benefits of an efficient healthcare system are many and multi-disciplinary. A host of many factors affects the health systems of the US and these in turn affect the outcomes at a national level. Problems that plague the achievement of the ideal are like the fact that the US lags behind many other countries of its status in the fraction of primary care physicians using electronic medical records yet it has the highest administrative costs per capita. The current healthcare in the US has many differences in health care utilization, which are shaped by socio-economic status, race, and insurance coverage status. If the resources on healthcare were used to provide the goods and services more uniformly, the population level health status would increase by a significant margin. The adoption of electronic units should also be used to achieve the improvement of productive efficiency. It is also important to note that vital changes remain significantly difficult to implement politically despite the theoretical viability (Institute Of Medicine 2001). The greatest hope there is for that significance improvement the health care systems of the US lies in the efforts to measure and reward accurately the outcome productivity. This primarily means that there should be use of cost effective management of diseases rather than what we have now which is ran based on unit service productivity for profit purposes. Ultimately, this will call for an overhaul of the pay that physicians and other health workers receive for rendering their services. Most importantly, the system is affecting the paradigm shift from paying for inputs to paying for outcomes rather than inputs. This is because the system tends to favor extending insurance coverage to technologies without much regard for the benefits or running costs incurred. Reference Institute Of Medicine (2001). Shaping the Future for Health Crossing the Quality Chasm: A new Health System for the 21st century. U.S. Government Printing Press. Read More