Essay On Integrated Health Care Systems

The three key factors of integrated health care systems are technological advancements, the effects of reimbursement policy, and changes in the legal and organizational environment. Technological advancement continues to grow, targeting various areas in the society including hospitals. The advancement has played a major role in almost all hospital processes by accelerating development of structure and management. Patient registration, data monitoring, and lab tests are enhanced by technology. Disparate systems previously existed because one system was handling pharmacy, another one was handling orders and another documentation. However, integrating such systems into one platform has produced a structured approach that has resulted in integrated

The healthcare industry is a large sector in the economy with many issues that need to be handled in an organized way. Issues like the actions of private entries that are driven by profit motive instead of healthcare needs should be handled by horizontal integration systems that control the activities of for-profit and not for profit healthcare sectors. By separating the systems, the efficiency of the whole industry is enhanced through specialization. The separate healthcare system is an approach that ensures quality and improves healthcare

The situation has made it difficult to distinguish the secondary care specialists from the primary care specialists (Shi and Douglas, 2005). The difficulties of defining primary healthcare have resulted in the need for integrated systems in an effort to align the physician’s interests with the institutional objectives. Giving physicians the right of ownership has increased the competition and pricing pressure within the industry. The fact that physicians can own surgery centers, ambulances or specialty hospitals is a threat to hospital delivery systems. The physician trend has provided few evidence of the superiority of integrated models over key factors like patient quality care and cost effectiveness. The other disadvantage is failure of vertically integrated systems to account for greater degree risk created by providing chain delivery services to a wide range of health services other than specializing in one product. According to Williams and Torrens (2008), some vertically integrated systems have established their health plans. However, financial and legal perspectives that transfer the risk to the institutional provider have affected the