This article covers a Health Organization Evaluation.
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Health Organization Evaluation
Description
Kaiser Permanente (KP) is based in Oakland, California. Henry Kaiser and Sidney Garfield founded the organization in 1945. The hospital offers integrated managed care within California and other states. The hospital has three distinct entities working towards a common goal, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Permanente Medical Groups, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, and their subsidiaries (Cooke, 2018). It serves more than 12.4 million members. It manages 39 hospitals with more than 700 offices. It also has more than 300,000 personnel, including more than 80,000 doctors and nurses. The organizational health strategy focuses on the social, economic, and behavioral aspects that affect community health. The strategy outlines the organization’s initiatives to perform, grow, and lead. KP’s quality of care has a high rating. KP’s objectives are to use its unique care model to offer high-quality, affordable health care services and enhance members’ and community health. KP works to ensure everyone has equal access to good health.
KP overall readiness
When talking about the future of health care, KP has to be among the leading organizations in shaping the future. KP seeks to serve people by offering integrated, innovative, and transformative care. KP’s vision is to be a trusted partner in total health, working closely with people to help them thrive and create the healthiest communities in the world (Abelson, 2013). According to KP, clinical care factors, social, economic, and behaviors shape health. KP is ready for the future, which is uncertain considering the healthcare environment’s ever-changing nature. It utilizes the industrial and information age models to create innovative ways to improve the quality of care. Its strategic plan involves the desire to perform, grow, and lead, aligning with its mission to provide high-quality and affordable care. KP seeks to improve its members and the community by driving performance in health care and service quality using people, places, and technology. KP also seeks to follow core and new growth and increase focus on its consumers (Cooke, 2018). The organization wants to be a national health care change leader, utilizing its expertise, trust, and relevance.
Its future readiness is embedded in its strategic theoretic plan and on-the-ground activities, such as using technology to increase access to care, a growing requirement, and future concern in healthcare. KP has one-stop shopping for most services such as home health care, labor and delivery, physical therapy, health education and preventive care, diagnosis, laboratory, pharmacy, ambulatory, emergency care, and hospitalization. KP embraces innovation and has had innovative ideas from the beginning, such as population-based approach, clinical information technology, group practice, prepayment, prevention, and total health. KP believes that its critical success factors are vital for the future (Cooke, 2018). The hospital succeeds in its clear and agreed-upon mission, integrated IT, alignment with structure and incentives, clinical leadership, measurement, comparison, acknowledgment, learning, and improvement culture.
KP plans to have a customer-centric paradigm where customers make a majority of the decisions. This paradigm includes integration and leveraging IT functionalities with scarce and specialized healthcare resources. Another aspect of the model is home as the hub. Homes and other settings will increasingly be choices for care delivery. KP seeks to adopt secure and seamless transitions of human skills and capabilities sets and operational processes to provide health care and services effectively, efficiently, and compassionately (Cooke, 2018). Other innovative approaches to the future include the KP HealthConnect, which enables access to all care information by all patients, all the time. These factors demonstrate KP’s readiness to address the citizens’ future health care needs.
Strategic plan to address issues on network growth, nurse staffing, resource management, and patient satisfaction
Nurse staffing, resource planning, and patient satisfaction affect a healthcare organization’s success. Kaiser Permanente seeks to be a leader in health care change, and to achieve that, a strategic plan is fundamental. Network growth involves increasing membership and improving health care service delivery. A strategic plan would help KP attain its specific goals. To expand, KP requires more value-based and patient-centric approaches to care delivery, aligning with its mission and values. Value-based healthcare involves increasing patient health outcomes focusing on quality rather than volume (Master of Health Administration, n.d.). Value-based approaches would effectively improve patient care and improve the populations’ health, enabling KP to grow membership. The plan is to provide patient-centered care where an individual’s preferences, values, beliefs, and needs guide all the clinical decisions. These approaches require true partnerships between individuals, the community, and the healthcare organization.
Nurse staffing involves the ratio of nurses to patients. An appropriate number of nurses should be available at all times to ensure patient safety (Nock, 2016). Nurse recruitment and role assignment should focus on a mix of skills and experience to ensure KP meets patient care needs and that staff deliver quality care. Sufficient nurse staffing enables nurses to deliver quality and safe care in all practice scenarios. Resource management involves eliminating waste and increasing equipment, processes, and staff productivity. Human resource management requires schedule planning to minimize and eliminate redundancy. Other aspects of resource management include handling patient data, updating and improvising equipment and processes, and ensuring resources’ availability when needed. Developing and implementing staff training and education help ensure effective resource use and management that translates to efficient provision of high-quality patient care. KP can improve patient satisfaction by ensuring effective communication, equal access to care, improving the hospital atmosphere, personalizing care, and spending time to educate patients by offering safer lifestyle options (Morris, Jahangir & Sethi, 2013). Other initiatives of improving patient satisfaction include pain management, hospital responsiveness, cleanliness, and quietness.
Current issues within the organizational culture and how they affect aspects of the strategic plan
A survey of HMO by the State of California reports a lack of transparency and mental health access problems that face KP. Lack of integrity and transparency, especially with patients suffering from mental health conditions, has put KP under scrutiny. When these attributes are embedded within the culture, implementing the strategic plan can be challenging. A healthcare organization should serve everyone equally. One of the core attributes of KP is to offer access to health, to every person, at all times. This does not reflect mental health care since KP fails to provide these patients with appropriate access to health care. KP mental health patients face inadequate and timely treatment (Gold, 2019). Another issue is the level of aggressiveness of its therapists in documenting concerns. Organizational culture and values would be that which treats everyone with respect. To successfully implement the strategic plan, KP needs to integrate integrity, transparency, and respect as core cultural values. It requires training its practitioners, especially mental health professions, to ensure equal access to everyone’s quality care. Improved access to appointments and mental health should be a priority.Â
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Strategy implementation model
A strategy implementation model would contribute to the strategic planning process. The Cascade model would be the best in this case. The model integrates vision, values, focus areas, objectives, and KPIs, making it simple to track progress. The first thing is to understand its purpose and where it wants to be in the future. Second, KP has to decide how it needs to conduct itself and how its employees should behave. Core values include trustworthiness, honesty, trust, respect, integrity, and transparency. The organization has to focus on areas of improvement such as nurse staffing, resource allocation, patient satisfaction, and health care delivery, especially for mental health patients. KP also needs to define objectives, which are the specific outcomes it desires for every focus area. KPIs would be used to measure whether or not KP is close to reaching the expected outcomes (Wright, 2019). The Cascade approach allows the organization to transform and adopt changes while assessing alignment with the organizational mission and vision.
Conclusion
The healthcare industry is increasingly becoming complex and challenging for many healthcare organizations that have to plan effectively to remain relevant in the future. Strategic planning shows future-readiness and encompasses assessing the current state and where the organization wants to be. The assessment would allow KP to devise initiatives, such as embracing technology, integrative care, and staff management approaches, to hit the targets. Organizational evaluation is vital in tracking progress and managing performance.
References
Abelson, R. (2013). The Face of Future Health Care.
Cooke, K. (2018). Kaiser Permanente: Integration, Innovation, and Transformation in Health Care.
Gold, J. (2019). Despite Certain Fixes, Kaiser Permanente’s Mental Healthcare Still Lags. Kaiser Health News.
Master of Health Administration. (n.d.). Understanding Strategic Planning in Healthcare Organizations.
Morris, B. J., Jahangir, A. A., & Sethi, M. K. (2013). Patient satisfaction: an emerging health policy issue. Am Acad Orthop Surg, 9, 29.
Nock, B. (2016). Ensuring Safe Nurse-to-Patient Ratios: What You Can Do. Retrieved from https://www.gebauer.com/blog/nurse-to-patient-ratios
Wright, T. (2019). Strategic Planning Models: 3 Awesome Examples. Retrieved from https://www.cascade.app/blog/strategy-planning-models Â