Leadership in the Dynamic Health Care Industry
Patient satisfaction is a major determinant of competitive advantage in the current health care environment. Organizations and leadership should design and implement structures, processes, and standards for achieving strategic priorities that match patients’ expectations. Failure to optimize outcomes increases the risk of declining revenues and lost market share when patients consider alternative providers. Competent leaders play active roles in interacting with patients, monitoring events in the clinical environment, and collaborating with the workforce to enhance patient satisfaction. The leader also involves patient and families in discussing gaps and improvements necessary to achieve organizational goals. This report highlights the need for healthcare providers to have leaders who understand daily operations, communicate and follow-through with employees to enhance competitive advantage.
Health Care Leadership and its Impact on Patients’ Experiences
Patient experience is a critical issue for health care operations. The process influences the care team’s ability to provide timely services, enhance access to information, and communicate effectively with patients and families. In this regard, patient experience means better patient safety, improved clinical outcomes, and desired patient satisfaction scores that boost competitive advantage (Wolf, 2017). Senior leaders are responsible for establishing a sense of direction and mobilizing resources necessary for improving patient experience. Leaders make decisions about procedural excellence and changes leading to organizational success. Qualities and traits align with strategic priorities established to enhance service excellence and increase patient satisfaction. The leader has the intensity and dedication that enable them to set clear expectations and provide instructions for meeting client needs (Wolf, 2017). The leader also engages staff to create a culture guided by commitment to enhancing the quality and safety of patient care. Thus, organizations should ensure they have competent leaders who create, support, and establish direction.
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Implications for the Organization if Patient Experience is Not a Strategic Priority
Patient dissatisfaction is a result of multiple administrative, technical, and human-related gaps. The common signs include longer waiting times, delays in returning calls, ineffective payment processing, and negative physician-patient relationship. The various signs reveal gaps in understanding patients’ expectations and responding through well-coordinated and collaborated care (Grocott & McSherry, 2018). Similarly, high dissatisfaction scores mean staff reluctance to manage various aspects of healthcare and embrace patient-centered practices. As such, the care team is unresponsive to events in the current clinical environment where patients demand a bigger role in making decisions across the care continuum.
Failure to make patient satisfaction a strategic priority triggers non-compliance with industry standards, increased malpractice litigation, poor prognosis, and inefficient utilization of resources. The organization fails to achieve the desired profitability due to inaccessible care, absence of comprehensive interventions, and failure to handle an increasing patient traffic (Grocott & McSherry, 2018). Further, the organization and patients experience high rates of unnecessary hospitalization and readmissions that increase cost of care. Thus, patient satisfaction should remain a priority for organizations committed to establishing and sustaining competitive advantage in a complex health care environment.
Service Line Management and Challenges Associated With the Organizational Structure
Service line integrates operational, financial, and strategic, and governance aspects to enable organizations to deliver patient-centered care. Hospitals reexamine clinical service strategies and operations in response to increasing demand for value-based care. Service lines include governance and leadership, clinical integration, clinical transformational, and analytics and innovation (Louis, 2019). Governance and leadership influence the type of services delivered. For instance, a cardiac service line involves imaging, heart failure, and treatment of heart attacks. The service line enhance goals alignment, improved quality, and reduced costs necessary to optimize care outcomes. Prioritizing governance and leadership as a key pillar of success enhance care coordination from access to diagnosis to treatment.
Clinical integration is another service line that covers touch points where patient enter the care system. The process incorporates check-in procedures, admission, treatment, and discharge. The objective is to enhance ease of access and coordination of patient services. In well-managed clinical integration, patients and the organization benefit from improved quality and safety. The third component of the service line is clinical transformation, which promotes evidence-based practices (Shahzad et al., 2019).
The concept entails establishing metrics and solutions meant to reduce undesirable variations and improve patient experience across the care continuum. With standardized approaches, there are opportunities to use resources efficiently, maintain accurate and complete documentation, and succeed in delivering value-based care. Further, hospitals can benefit from analytics and innovation that enable the care team to turn data into actionable information. Organization can facilitate performance driven care with specific goals and outcomes.
Clinical departments focused more on volume-based care prior to the development of service lines. Organizations had a vertical structure that limited organizations from organizing patient care under a broad framework. The traditional model focused more on diagnosis and using standardized assessments and treatments. In this case, the facility determined schedules and routines, while the care team made major decisions about treatment. The centralized decision-making limited patients from sharing insights into their preferred services (McClelland, 2017). Organizational structures have challenges that require proactive measures to streamline service delivery. One issue is the absence of a revenue cycle system that matches demands of the service line model. Ideally, monitoring business progress of a service is challenging, which limits leaders from making informed conclusions on where to invest resources. Similarly, temporarily redundant clinical and administrative structures affect efficiency of service lines. However, horizontal structures create opportunities to integrate departments and specialties. Shared decision-making, good analytics and accountability are necessary to optimize patient and organizational outcomes.
Pros and Cons of Leading the Service Line
Leading the service sets leaders for strategic practices centered on delivering patient-centered services. Service line leaders accept the opportunity to develop plans and make data-driven decisions. The leaders allocate time, resources, and support necessary to execute functions effectively. Thus, one of the best ways for an organization to make progress is by utilizing the service line to establish competitive advantage. The dyad management model reminds organizations about the need to break down traditional structures and embrace practices that promote a shared vision (Shahzad et al., 2019). Dyad leadership reinforces ability to deliver patient-centered and comprehensive health services. Thus, one advantage is the emphasis on patient-focused practices that promote collaboration between leaders and the rest of the workforce. In this case, it is easier to do quick reviews of a patient’s medical status and progress to improve throughput. Further, the team envisions shared goals based on collaborative practices that solidify relationships between clinicians and administration.
A second advantage is team-based frameworks that empower physicians and non-physicians to participate in quality and safety initiatives. Everyone can provide insights into operational strategies that facilitate better and stronger ways of delivering care to patients with diverse needs (McClelland, 2017). However, effective use of the dyad approach depends on the level of transparency among stakeholders during decision-making. Relationships thrive in an environment where individuals understand their colleagues’ strengths. Failure to establish meaningful relationships due to ego or other interpersonal conflicts undermines the quality of communication (Wolf, 2017). Thus, a culture of excellent communication is necessary to get clinicians and administrators to participate in conversations that build consensus. Leading the service lines encourages team-based functions where clinicians and non-clinicians share perspectives on enhancing patient throughput. The team shares details of cost-saving practices across departments to ensure that all aspects of a complex healthcare organization match patient expectations.
The Importance of Employee and Provider Relations on Success of the Organization
Employee and provider relations determine the workforce ability to deliver patient-centered and evidence-based care. Support functions provided to a service line include information technology that facilitates smooth transition of patients from a silo to the next. Finance is another support function that shapes the success of a service line management. For the structure to succeed, leaders have to mobilize financial resources for the integration of different silos (Eucharia & Nancy, 2020). Service line directors require several resources to make them effective in implementing service lines.
The director needs qualities and traits that give them the authority to initiate shared decision-making. Authority determines ability to set direction and ensure alignment with strategic goals and objectives. Providing leadership means pairing physicians and non-physicians with administrators. The goal is to share the responsibility of leading a clinical service line. Another resource is robust communication structures to create a culture of dialogue and interactions when addressing patient needs (Wolf, 2017). The process promotes transparency among stakeholders such that it becomes easier to utilize each other’s strengths to achieve the intended results. Excellent communication structures eliminate variability in service delivery by bringing together clinicians and administrators. In other words, a culture of consensus enables the workforce to move forward as a team.
The Role of the Health Care Leader in Organizational Quality Improvement
Quality management is an important concept because it helps organizations respond adequately to patients’ needs and expectations. The process entails improving various aspects of care including employee behavior, attitudes, and values to optimize care outcomes. Quality management is appropriate for enhancing safety, effectiveness, and efficiency (Wolf, 2017). The process accelerates organizational performance by enabling the workforce to monitor, assess, and improve standards of care across the continuum. Quality management also facilitates continuous upgrading of equipment, infrastructure, and technology to generate better results. Leaders play vital roles in quality improvement. The transformational and visionary traits and qualities enable leaders to set strategic priorities and establish a sense of direction for achieving them.
Leaders also have influence, which allows them to inspire shared aspirations and commitment towards delivering patient-centered services. The leaders set standards and example in collaborating with an interdisciplinary team to coordinate all aspects of care and produce the best results (Eucharia & Nancy, 2020). Organizations should strive to have competent leaders who make a difference by identifying improvement opportunities and facilitating response to barriers that undermine quality and safety of patient care. Managing rounding is another essential component that improves clinical outcomes and patient experiences. The concept triggers high employee satisfaction, low turnover rates, and a culture of continuous improvement.
In this context, leaders such as department heads and nurse managers collaborate with physicians and non-physicians to understand issues within the clinical environment. Connecting with frontline staff makes it easier to discuss patient safety and generate creative ideas to continue quality improvement (McClelland, 2017). Management rounding enhances commitment to patient safety such that everyone understands issues across the organization. Leaders follow-up on issues and demonstrate willingness to boost morale and transform the organization. Remarkable progress in patient care is possible for organizations with leaders who understand the connection between service and leadership. Supporting and engaging employees makes leader familiar with quality and safety challenges and improvements necessary to enhance brand credibility.
Conclusion
Sound leadership is a valuable source of competitive advantage for healthcare organizations. The leaders set goals and expectations associated with evidence-based and patient-centered care. Thus, organizations benefit from having individuals who understand what is best for them and the approaches for maximizing patient satisfaction. Competent leaders establish rapport with clinicians and non-clinicians to discuss enablers and barriers to providing safe care and excellent services to different patients. With the shift to service lines, there are opportunities for organizations to respond well to complexities in the healthcare sector. Competent leaders understand the impact of a horizontal organizational structure and emphasis on patient-centric care. Thus, leaders design and implement structures, procedures, and standards for coordinating functions and optimizing patient experiences.
References
Chazal, R., & Montgomery, M. (2017). The dyad model and value-based care. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 14(69), 1353-1354. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28279298/
Eucharia, U., & Nancy, A. (2020). Employee relationship management as a correlate of employee commitment in primary health care sector. Journal of Business and Management, 22(4), 25-34. https://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jbm/papers/Vol22-issue4/Series-1/D2204012534.pdf
Grocott, A., & McSherry, W. (2018). The patient experience: Informing practice through identification of meaningful communication from the patient’s perspective. Healthcare, 6(1), 1-14. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5872233/pdf/healthcare-06-00026.pdf
McClelland, M. (2017). Nurse led reform: Is it time to rethink the nursing unit? Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 22(2), 1-12. https://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Vol-22-2017/No2-May-2017/Nurse-Led-Reform.html
Shahzad, M., Upshur, R., Donnelly, P., Bharmal, A., Wei, X., Feng, P., & Brown, A. (2019). A population-based approach to integrated healthcare delivery: A scoping review of clinical care and public health collaboration. BMC Public Health, 19(708), 1-14. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7002-z
Wolf, J. (2017). Patient experience: The new heart of healthcare leadership. Frontiers of Health Services Management, 33(3), 3-16. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28319978/