Importance Of Patient Accountability

1211 Words3 Pages

Is a Patient’s Worth and Liability Important to Health Employees? Introduction Improving healthcare is a long, time-consuming process. The most important phase is knowing what the glitches are and then finding a small step to improve them. The only way to successfully change our health care system is small step by small step. A problem in today’s healthcare is that patient’s want and need their medical staff to hold value and accountability in their care but they don’t know the fine lines of what these requirements actually are. Porter (2010) defines value “as the health outcomes achieved per dollar spent” (p.2477). Patients need to be aware of this definition and they need to be deciding exactly how many of these health outcomes they are personally …show more content…

Accountability is apparently a multi-purpose word or one would think that after looking at five different websites and reading five different definitions. In simple terms it can be said as “being accountable means having the obligation to answer questions regarding decisions and/or actions” (Brinkerhoff, 2004, p. 372). Health care providers need to be held accountable for financial spending and performance grade. Brinkerhoff also tells readers “At the health system level, the focus is on the services, outputs and results of public agencies and programs, not on individual service encounters between patients and providers.” The more accountable providers are forced to be the harder they will try to lower cost and increase carefulness in care procedures and treatment routes. Health care providers have to pay for extremely expensive insurance and this causes them to have to charge more for their services so that they are still making a profit over their initial spending. If accountability increased and less accidents were happening in health institutions then it is possible that their insurance premiums would decrease and they could charge less for care. Then there can come the problem that providers can feel that performance and finances are directly linked. In some instances when the financial cost goes down so does the performance level. Health care providers just need to find the perfect balance and for this they need more rules and

Open Document