Category: Healthcare

Primary Response: Within the Discussion Board area, write 300-500 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas.
For this Discussion Board, please complete the following:
The healthcare world and the world overall is now a very different place since the COVID-19 global pandemic uprooted people’s daily lives. Healthcare policy had to change on a dime in many places. For example, hospitals fearing the worst limited the visitation of family members to those loved ones struck with illness (both COVID and non-COVID). New parents had to take turns seeing their newborns. Telehealth has taken on a new leading role in many healthcare organizations because face-to-face visits were no longer acceptable due to nationwide lockdowns. Many organizations did this to mitigate risk and follow strategic national policy. Your organization has decided to take a stand to implement the same strategy. Its policy is to not allow any visitors during a lockdown.
In this class debate, you are going to be placed on a side of the new visitation policy. Your task is to argue for or against the new policy based on your last name. Those with last names beginning in A–M will argue against, and those with last names beginning in N–Z will argue for. You are tasked with presenting your case to the class on why or why not the policy should stand. Cover the following:
Consider how this has changed the way that you view healthcare access and equality.
Consider the risk to the organization.
Consider the impact of the decision.
Should there be exceptions to the policy? Why or why not?
Use data and evidence from literature to support your argument.
Remember that in healthcare administration, you are often tasked with supporting unpopular policy; it is not your job to change this policy; rather, your job is to defend the side that you are on respectfully.

Imagine that you are a hospital administrator at Sunlight Hospital in California. The main complaint among the patients is the quality of care. The hospital board has become aware of this issue and wants to see it addressed. Your job is to understand the state of the hospital, create value, increase efficiency, and turn the facility into a local hospital of choice. Whenever you are making visits to various wards to meet the employees and the patients, you hear how the patients love the hospital, but they would like to see certain improvements in care. The employees seem to be very busy executing their duties and not interacting much with the patients. The hospital board has asked you to compile a report of your findings and suggested strategies for achieving the hospital’s current goals.
Note: You may create or make all necessary assumptions needed for the completion of this assignment.
Write a 4-6 page paper in which you:
Identify five measurements of quality of care in a hospital, and explain the major reasons why you believe these measurements matter to patients in their process of choosing a hospital for emergency or inpatient care.
Determine four main features in health care organizations that can be used to design a successful quality improvement plan. Describe the manner in which the features can lead to failure or success of quality of care in Sunlight Hospital.
Propose the main reasons why the quality of care would add value to and create a competitive advantage for Sunlight Hospital. Provide a rationale for your response.
Use at least four quality sources to support your writing. Choose sources that are credible, relevant, and appropriate. Cite each source listed on your source page at least one time within your assignment.
Use the Strayer University Online Library to find four recent resources that are current (within the last five years) for this assignment.
This course requires the use of Strayer Writing Standards (SWS). The library is your home for SWS assistance, including citations and formatting. Please refer to the Library site for all support. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
The specific course learning outcome associated with this assignment is:
Propose a quality improvement plan for a hospital that will add value and create a competitive advantage.

I′ve attached the marking criteria, a copy of the main works with yellow highlighted points that could be useful, and graphs with important statistics. Also attached is a step-by-step requirement for each section in blue.
If you have any questions, please contact me.

Questions: 
Some health care reform advocates believe that “the market” should play the central role in the financing, payment, and/or delivery of health care services. Evaluate this claim.
Commentators on both the political right and left tend to portray the U.S. healthcare system as unique (for good or ill) compared with government-financed systems in all other economically advanced democracies. Joseph White describes the “international standard” set by other countries. Do they all use roughly the same model of health care system financing? Describe two ways in which the U.S. system deviates from the international standard and their effects.
Instructions:
In your answers, please be sure to make full, appropriate, and explicit (cited) use of the course materials where appropriate so that I can see how you are utilizing the course. I would avoid quoting directly from the readings, and instead simply use your own words cogently and cite specific readings and lectures/discussions as they provide the conceptual or empirical support for your essays. If you do have direct quotations, be absolutely certain to use quotation marks and provide citations with page numbers.
Your charge is to develop the most effective answer possible, balancing the space constraints with the body of available course material.
For the purposes of this midterm examination, you may cite the course readings by simply providing parenthetically the last names of authors, the dates of their publications, and the page numbers (e.g., Daniels 2008, 37). If you are citing something we discussed in class, use this format and the date (e.g., Lecture, April 15, 2024). For this particular assignment, don’t worry about providing a separate bibliography—the syllabus will serve that function. For your answers please use only the materials presented in the course.     
Length: Answer each question separately. Each question has an absolute maximum of 600 words. Please use your software to count the words and report the total. The parenthetical references to course materials don’t count toward the word limit, so exclude them from the 600 words for each essay.
Citations: You want to make it clear to us that you are using the course materials, so be sure to cite all readings and lectures that you use to support the analysis in your presentations. Again, use author/data/page number parenthetical references (e.g., Starr 1992, 12)  

Your Financial Strategies Summary provides organization executives with reasons why they should approve financial strategies for your sustainability initiative plan. It demonstrates your ability to critically think through financial strategy development and presents your financial petition to leadership for resources for implementation. 
Prepare the Financial Strategies Summary for your sustainability initiative plan in 6 to 8 pages. 
Include the following in your plan:
A brief summary of your sustainability initiative proposal
A minimum of 3 financial strategies to fund implementation of your initiative
An analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each of your financial strategies for implementation of your initiative
An evaluation of how each of the following impacts those financial strategies within your initiative:
Proposed community partnerships
Proposed waste reduction efforts
Proposed improved patient care outcomes
Petition to the leadership for approval of your financial strategies to enact the initiative
Cite 3 reputable references to support your assignment (e.g., trade or industry publications, government or agency websites, scholarly works, or other sources of similar quality). 
Format your references according to APA guidelines.
Submit your assignment.

Outbreak Investigation
On February 7, 2018, a nurse employed at the Flinn Corporation noticed an increase in the number of employees who were sick. She was concerned that there may be a Salmonella outbreak at the company. She has interviewed each of the employees at the corporation. She has taken samples and sent them out for testing but has not received the results. She asks you, the local epidemiologist, to investigate to see if an outbreak exists and if so what the source of the outbreak is. You follow the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s steps in outbreak investigation https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/steps/detection.html) and report your findings to her. Please note that we will not address all outbreak investigation steps in this assignment.  Here is an additional resource on epidemiology, https://www.cdc.gov/training/publichealth101/epidemiology.html
Use the attached Excel worksheet to produce graphs and statistics to answer the questions below. Submit your report as a Word doc and include figures and tables you generate. The report should be easy to follow and interpret and should be written as an academic paper in proper APA formatting.  This paper should be 8-10 pages in length (not including the title page, abstract or references.  The paper should also include properly formatted tables and graphs of the data you are given (please refer to the week 7 learning material on formatting tables and graphs), as well as, the data you analyzed.
1. Look at the Excel Spreadsheet attached. There are 3 worksheets (see tabs on bottom of page – “Nurse’s Interview”, “Epi Curve”, “Retrospective Cohort Study”). The first sheet “Nurse’s Interview” has a line list of employees who work at Flinn Corporation. This sheet represents the data the nurse has collected from those employees in an interview. Do you think that an outbreak exists? Why would you recommend to further investigate? Discuss your reasoning. (Step 2: Establish outbreak)
2. Research salmonellosis using academic sources. Are the symptoms that the ill employees exhibit consistent with salmonellosis? Provide a brief summary (1-2 paragraphs) of the disease and discuss the chain of infection for this disease. Use in-text citations in proper APA format and include all sources in your reference section. (Step 3: Verify diagnosis)
3. Identify the percentage of ill employees with each symptom. For example, 1 out of 12 ill employees had blood in stool (Bs) = 8.3%. (Step 4: Working case definition)
4. Conduct descriptive epidemiology (Step 6). Describe the characteristics of the ill employees to determine trends and risk factors.
a. Person – Calculate the percentage of ill employees that are male/female. Determine the mean age of the ill employees.
b. Place – What percentage of ill employees ate at the cafeteria? What percentage of well employees ate at the cafeteria?
c. Time – Using the data collected in the Nurse’s Interview, fill in the column “# of cases” in the “Epi Curve” worksheet. Use 0 if there are no cases. As you fill in the data, the graph will automatically generate. Choose an appropriate title for the graph. Copy and paste graph into your report. What type of epidemic curve is it ? (Hint: read https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/steps/detection.html)
5. Based on the information you have gathered, you have developed an hypothesis that there is a food being served at the cafeteria that is causing the employees to become ill. You need to further test this hypothesis by conducting a retrospective cohort study (Step 8). Use the worksheet “Retrospective Cohort Study” to calculate attack rates and risk ratios. The first food item Baked Chicken is done for you. You can also consult https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/outbreaks/steps/detection.html for help. Report the Risk ratio for each food item. Based on risk ratios, which is food is most likely to be the source of the illness? Explain.
6. Based on your findings, what would you recommend for prevention and control measures? Apply food safety principles from academic sources to discuss further prevention of Salmonella outbreaks in the cafeteria. (Step 11) Use in-text citations and include sources in reference section.
7. Include a properly formatted reference section in APA format that includes at least 3 academic sources (popular sources should not be used).
8.  Tips for writing your paper:  Include the entire table of risk ratios and attack rates as one table, make sure to include the graph of cases reported, and you can also include the tables from the Nurses interview in the attached Excel file

As the manager of a health care facility, you have been notified of your parent organization’s plan to implement a database management system beginning with your facility. List and identify the standards development process for formalizing this system. Identify the steps that you will require to initialize this system.
Write a 1–2-page paper (not including the title and reference pages). Use APA style and cite references published within the last 5 years.

Module 03 Content
Are you ready to present the policies for your two compliance plans in a way that all employees will understand at a large medical facility where you are the Compliance Officer?
In 4-page paper describe the policies for each of the two compliance plans.
Break each policy section into 2 pages each.
Remember to support your policies for the two plans with a total of three research sources, cited at the end in APA format. (That’s 1-2 research sources per plan).
Then, summarize your plan in a 5-8 slide PowerPoint presentation.
Polices you should consider covering for each plan come under the key compliance elements:
Compliance Standards
High-Level (personal) Responsibility
Education
Communication
Monitoring/Auditing (for Safety)
Enforcement/Discipline
Response/Prevention
Look these over in your research, and then select just two of these key elements and write your policies under them for each of your two compliance plans. (Your policies for each plan can zero in on different key elements.)
Example:
A compliance plan about washing hands between patients might describe policies for High Level (personal) Responsibility and Monitoring/Auditing (for Safety)
A compliance plan about charging patients for Diabetes Management Education as a Physician Visit might describe policies for Compliance Standards and Enforcement/Discipline.

Must be three to four double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Writing CenterLinks to an external site. ’s APA StyleLinks to an external site. resource for each case study.
Must include a separate title page for each case study with the following:
Title of paper including the chapter number and case study title
Student’s name
Course name and number
Instructor’s name
Date submitted
Recommend where would you start to improve the user experience.
Pharmacists are asking for your help due to struggles with non-integrated systems. What methods would you use to examine this issue?
Describe how usability should be incorporated as part of the purchasing process for this institution.
case study 1A tertiary care center in the western United States has aninstalled base of EHRs supported by Cerner Corporation forinpatient areas and by Epic for outpatient areas. Other technol-ogy includes a suite of about 300 different applications sup-ported by the IT department. The current environment,while including robust capabilities such as computerized pro-vider order entry, is“siloed”with information. Healthcare pro-viders complain that they have difficulty obtaining the“bigpicture”of the patient across systems and they have to remem-ber information located in disparate systems. They are bur-dened with integrating information themselves. Not only isthis time consuming; it is potentially prone to error. Providershave developed numerous workarounds to the different sys-tems in ambulatory and inpatient areas, including“shadow”files for patients they see frequently. Nurses complain that theyhave to“jump around”the inpatient system to find informationthey need for activities such as patient handoffs.The organization responds by developing a vision for thefuture that centered on the concept of knowledge manage-ment (KM). This concept is defined as the systematic processof identifying, capturing, and transferring information andknowledge that people can use to create, compete (with otherorganizations), and improve. A crucial aspect of KM isimproving the user experience. As the leaders in the organi-zation begin to address KM and improve the user experience,they are employing the same tactics described in this chapter.  case 2  Chapter 24:
Assuming that you are the clinical content manager leading reporting efforts, recommend the approach you would take to address the reporting problem.
Describe how the effort of changing preadmission testing data collection from paper to the Electronic Health Record System (EHR) can be approached.
Using Patient Safety and Quality Research Design (PSQRD) methodology, identifying area of quality improvement in the hospital setting, recommend a process plan and identify the expected outcomes.
Western Heights Hospital (WHH) is a 1125-bed, 5-hospitalacademic healthcare system servicing central and westernMassachusetts. WHH is the only designated Level I TraumaCenter for adults and children in the area and is home toNew England’s first hospital-based air ambulance and theregion’s only Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Center.WHH launched a 5-year strategic plan with a fundamentalgoal of a system-wide move from a predominately paperenvironment to an electronic one. Phase I includedimplementation of an EHR system consisting of order entryfor all laboratory, radiology, and patient care orders. Addi-tionally, clinical documentation was implemented, includ-ing admission assessments and all nursing flow sheets.The nursing informatics counsel, a 25-member group ofnurses representing all disciplines, developed the clinicalcontent. The clinical content was custom built using bothfree text and structured data entry fields within theapplication Three months after go-live, hospital leadership is reportingthat it is unable to report on various state and federally man-dated quality measures. These measures track healthcare qual-ity based on national standards, are compared to nationallyaccepted benchmarks, and are used to plan ways to improvequality. Leadership has communicated that the reports gener-ated by the system are incomplete and are putting the hospitalat financial risk due to lower reimbursement rates.Clinicians are eager and excited to continue to developcontent in the application. However, the project’s programmanager is proposing a stabilization and optimizationapproach and does not want to go forward with contentdevelopment until the issue of reporting has been assessedand addressed

Answer each questions with 700 words or more with at least 2 references.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of involving the intended audience or population in the community health assessment? 
Review the five perspectives for community health assessment in Table 3-3 (I have attached a picture of this table). Sometimes one perspective dominates, but more often, planners use a combination of approaches.  Describe a situation where two or more perspectives would be valuable. Which perspectives would you use in that situation and why?
Imagine that you are part of a community health assessment and planning group. Your group believes it is important to know the rate of type 2 diabetes for whites, blacks, and Hispanics in the three census tracts being assessed. However, the only publicly available data are the county statistics that are not broken down by race or ethnicity. How would you respond to the group’s, request for information about type 2 diabetes for whites, blacks, and Hispanics in the three census tracts?
words or more