Healthcare Economics
Healthcare Economics
Order Instructions:
Write a final paper that clearly applies economic analysis on a specific way that would significantly improve health care. Also discuss how it would affect access, quality and cost. Please apply healthcare economics concepts that you have learned.
SAMPLE ANSWER
Healthcare Economics
The healthcare sector encounters challenges that hinder provision of services to clients. Economics approaches come in handy in solving certain challenges. Often, systematic economic considerations and evaluations of problems help institutions maximize care delivery to their customers. Usually, healthcare organizations apply economic theories regarding, producers, consumers, as well as the society when handling financial problems. Economic theories allow organizations to adequately understand the tendencies of their customers, service providers, competitors, regulators, and generally, business environment (Wels, 2014). Information of this nature is usually crucial in decision-making processes. This paper analyzes an appropriate economic way that would significantly better health care. Particularly, the paper addresses how such a way would solve problems associated with care accessibility, quality, as well as cost. The paper also aims at applying critical economic concepts when analyzing the described strategy.
Strategy to Improve Healthcare
For healthcare systems to realize improvements, they should efficiently handle their specific problems. Such problems include economic hindrances such as inadequacy of resources and staff, market failure stiff competition, and unfavorable economic environments. Usually, economic hardships hinder efficacy of service delivery to customers, and they may worsen when not solved in time. They hinder care affordability, accessibility, and they may also impair its maintenance to high standards. Stakeholders should address challenges from their sources for them to completely overcome them. For example, there may be a need to modify certain regulations such as those guiding the provision of health insurance. Economic analysis of healthcare sectors should particularly enable stakeholders to inform relevant authorities such as local and state governments on appropriate courses of their regulations. The approach would include effective definitions of health packages, programs, benefits and others financial concerns. Economic approaches would also offer reliable research findings that would be the basis for allocation of resources to different schemes and departments in healthcare. The strategy should involve parties directly associated with the presenting challenges such as policy regulators and health care managements.
Effective Strategy and Improvement of Cost, Quality, and Accessibility of Care
Effective strategies that would lower the cost of healthcare should address existing issues associated with high prices of care. It would facilitate the understanding of stakeholders about drivers of the cost of care. There are numerous determinants influencing the cost of health and efficient strategies should enable the identification of specific factors. Again, strategies should inform how these drivers raise the cost of care, and also, why different determinants cause their specific alterations on the cost of care. Usually, regulatory agencies would play centrally in implementing effective approaches of managing healthcare costs. For instance, while insurance policies are meant to lessen healthcare costs for individuals, poor economic considerations could impair their effectiveness and accomplishment of primary objectives. For instance, overwhelming costs of care would economically drain the public through premiums. In addition, people would suffer losses through out-of-pocket expenditure in acquiring services to supplement their health needs. Other critical issues whose inclusion in economic strategic plans would improve healthcare costs include expenditure on prescription medications and management of preventable diseases (Health Care Service Corporation, 2015). In addressing costs associated with prescription medicines, important factors include price fluctuations, demand for specific types of medicines, and their appropriate use by prescribers and patients. An efficient strategy would also lower the cost of healthcare by promoting practices that protect people from diseases. Some diseases are expensive to treat yet measures of their prevention are cheap (Kottke & Isham, 2010, p. 73). For instance, an economically sustainable strategy would include public education on health and cost consequences of behavioral practices such as smoking, alcohol consumption, and inappropriate dieting. Adoption of recommendations by the public would see to the reduction of cases of cost-intensive diseases, and it would eventually minimize financial straining associated with high treatment cost.
Care quality is also a crucial consideration for planners. Provision of high-quality health services saves costs in the long-run. An efficient economic strategy would address factors that contribute to poor-quality in healthcare. For instance, it would address issues such as medication errors which do not just compromise patient safety, but also cost institutions significant financial losses. It would be important to establish sources of errors and set up strategies to avoid them. In most cases, errors could be drug-related, operative, procedure-based, or diagnostic and so on. Avoiding errors would make care less wasteful and economically sustainable. So as to handle quality concerns effectively, institutions should budget for quality services including accurate diagnostic techniques, adherence to standard procedures, and enhancement of the skills of their professionals. Generally, institutions should proactively promote patient safety so as offer high-quality care that remains economically viable. In the US, several reputable hospitals go as far as establishing departments charged primarily with advocating for patient safety (Andel, Davidow, Hollnader, & Moreno, 2015, p. 46).
Issues associated with care inaccessibility include inadequacy of medical facilities, services such as emergency care, drugs, as well as insufficient general and specialized staff. In addition, there are hindrances such as poor infrastructure, cultural and social restrictions, and importantly, financial constraints. Stakeholders in healthcare should address specific hindrances to care accessibility. For instance, they should prioritize on staffing hospitals, equipping them adequately, and enabling them to offer services of varied nature. Effective strategies should also address accessibility from the perspective of customers. For instance, the society may discourage adolescents to seek sexual health (Chandra-Mouli, McCarraher, Phillips, Williamson, & Hainsworth, 2014, p. 115). To overcome such limitations, healthcare stakeholders may budget for educational programs for communities.
References
Andel, C., Davidow, S., Hollnader, M., & Moreno, D. (2015). The economics of health care quality and medical errors. Journal of Health Care Finance, 39(1), 31-48.
Chandra-Mouli, V., McCarraher, D. R., Phillips, S. J., Williamson, N. E., & Hainsworth, G. (2014). Contraception for adolescents in low and middle income countries: needs, barriers, and access. Reproductive Health, 11(1), 112-123.
Health Care Service Corporation. (2015). Economics of health care. Retrieved from http://www.hcsc.com/pdf/economics_health_care2.pdf
Kottke, T. E. & Isham, G. J. (2010). Measuring health care access and quality to improve health in populations. Prev Chronic Dis, 7(4), 73.
Wels, S. (2014). What is health economics? Retrieved from http://www.jhsph.edu/departments/international-health/global-health-masters-degrees/master-of-health-science-in-health-economics/what-is-health-economics.html
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