Healthcare Organizational Assessment Paper

As healthcare facilities strive for greater efficiency, a critical first step is a comprehensive review of operations as they currently exist; an organizational assessment can help find any deficiencies or gaps and guide you to proper improvements that are needed for greater success.

An organizational assessment is systematic and collects and evaluates data about many areas of an organization’s internal capacity, from finances, supply chain, personnel and quality, to marketing and market share. In the end, you will cut costs while improving your quality of care and outcomes.

Appraising and evaluating

Strategic planning and improvement can be simplified into just a few key steps that reassess the current state of operations and reinforce

Strengthening infrastructure could mean ramping up onboarding of staff members, focusing more on training to up quality care standards and outcomes, or keying in on finance and revenue issues. The key is to identify your highest priority elements and give them the needed discussion and focus to effect positive change.

Monitor - An efficient performance management system must be in place, or put into place, to establish the baseline for improvement. Monitoring the performance of each of the assessed objectives will help to identify any issues with the action plan and allow you to re-allocate resources if needed.

These areas are the most crucial to be examined during an organizational assessment:

Finances/revenue cycle

We put this one first for a reason; failings in this area can kill an otherwise healthy organization. It is vital to be aware of the particulars on the revenue owed to the facility. A lot of bad debt is a big problem, and must be quickly addressed, as should an unhealthy payer mix or lengthy accounts receivable turn times.

In addition to your revenue cycle, other finance items to review in-depth are your profitability, debt capacity, expenses and capital spending. Each of these elements is important in ensuring the long-term viability of an organization.

Supply

Getting a handle on your leadership capacity gives you the insight needed about the ability of your leaders to prioritize, inspire, make decisions, provide guidance and motivate the team.

Your staffing level, quality of employees, communications, technology and facilities, and most other daily decisions, are made by your management team. Therefore, it is crucial that organizational leadership is in tune with the vision and missions of the organization, and that everyone is “rowing in the same direction”. Quality

The quality of the clinical services you offer and the outcomes of those services, is a key element in your organization’s success. For this reason, efficiency and throughput, patient safety and quality indicators, and service distribution are all important elements to examine.

Along with clinical services, another area that affects quality care is information technology; having the right data capabilities, information sharing and coordination of care data are important to appropriate treatments and positive patient outcomes. Market