The cost of healthcare in the United States has been on a constant rise. To address the issue, the healthcare system needs to alter its business model to provide affordable healthcare to all citizens (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). Supply chain inefficiencies, poor labour management, and service duplication have been the primary cause of the rising healthcare cost (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). While healthcare systems can deploy several strategies that positively impact affordable healthcare, commercial players in the industry have put a risk-based payment structure that has significantly increased costs.
Surprisingly, healthcare providers have low control over revenue and cost of healthcare. However, they have control over operating expenses, which entail costs associated with patient care, such as holistic costs, labour costs, utilities, property costs, et cetera (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). Therefore, to some extent, health care facilities can aid in the provision of affordable healthcare by reducing operating costs and scrapping off inefficiencies (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). Evidently, these operational inefficiencies have considerably escalated the cost of healthcare provision (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). Healthcare service duplication, suboptimal human resource management, and supply chain inefficiencies pose a great hindrance to American citizens’ affordable health.
Another cause of the escalating price of healthcare provision is that operating expenses in healthcare facilities have significantly overtaken revenue growth (Auerbach et al., 2018). Seemingly, the primary cause of healthcare facilities’ operating cost outpacing inflow of revenue is healthcare workers’ size (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). According to research, healthcare works account for about half of the aggregate budget of healthcare expenses. With so many health workers employed, their work potential is underutilized due to several duplications of roles, unnecessary bureaucracies, and procedures that are usually considered as a requirement (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). Hence, the cost of employed physicians weighs so heavily on the patients making it almost impossible to receive affordable healthcare.
Apart from high operational cost, the unintentional extra cost of incorporating a healthcare system is heavily working against affordable healthcare systems to the American citizens (Gerardi et al., 2018). The new technologies have often been installed in healthcare facilities without adequate integration (Auerbach et al., 2018). The rush in installing updates of new technologies without optimizing and studying the health workforce’s workflow brings about inefficiencies that cannot appropriately accommodate the new technologies (Jacobs et al., 2018). Healthcare industries in the United States have not experienced the efficiency advantages typically apparent in other industries due to poor technology integration with the healthcare system (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). To a great extent, technologies have increased the cost of healthcare provision than it has saved.
Healthcare rising costs can also be traced to the costs associated with poor patient workflow (Auerbach et al., 2018). Poor management of patient inflow results in the overutilization of intensive care units and the overutilization of emergency rooms (Jacobs et al., 2018). This further creates treatment and surgery delays and increases infection rates (Palumbo et al. 2017). Hence patients stay longer in hospitals than expected, thereby increasing the cost of healthcare (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). The Healthcare system in the United States should strive to optimize its operation by sufficiently and efficiently managing its patient inflow system to avoid an unnecessary rise in healthcare costs.
According to research, in the year 2005, American citizens’ healthcare expenditure spent approximately two trillion dollars on health care, which was approximately sixteen percent of the total gross domestic product (Auerbach et al., 2018). Currently, American citizens’ health care expenditure has significantly risen to almost twenty-five percent of the total gross domestic product (Gerardiet al., 2018). Besides, the cost of treating some chronic diseases such as heart attack has significantly increased by over ten thousand dollars (Gerardiet al., 2018).
Review of Articles Addressing Issues in Healthcare
Our first article provides information on the triple aims centered on improving the individual experience of care, improving the population’s health, and reducing the individual capital cost of health (Norful et al., 2018). To transform the population healthcare, there is a need to have strong leadership in place that ensures that a productive workforce aims to lower the cost of healthcare (Jacobs et al., 20118). The workforce is physicians, nurses, and all employees who need to work in joy to realize the meaning of their duties as attached to improving workforce experience of joy while serving the population (Jacobs et al., 20118). Employees’ joy has a significant impact on general service delivery as it has a sense of accomplishment of duties performed where employees experience the success they achieve while serving.
Research links employees’ performance to joy and the meaning of work. IN the U.S.A, 60 % of employees prefer leaving their duties because they lack joy and meaning of work in their areas of service, caused by threats of psychological and physical which are in their areas of work (Broome & Marshall 2021). Also, more days have wasted work as caused by occupational illness resulting from threats (Broome & Marshall 2021). Most organizations tend to solve the threat by ensuring that human rights are protected and educating employees on the need to observe the cultural diversity of the people they work with and serve as they practice leadership.
Ensuring joy among employees improves the experience of providing care services that is a positive impact and negatively failure to address threats resulting in misuse of resources in the industry (Broome & Marshall 2021). More employees would leave the profession, creating a gap that is a national concern (Pittman & Scully-Russ 2016). For example, employees will prefer to further their profession by specializing in the field to improve the quality of service in the industry, ensuring optimum use of resources in the industry.
The second provides a sufficient explanation of leadership’s impact on the rising cost of healthcare provision and other associated inefficiencies, such as poor management of patients and facilities (Broome & Marshall 2021). Effective leadership is barely learned, developed, and implemented in several aspects. The context of leadership is a thought-provoking aspect of the healthcare system. It involves the principles of adaptive systems and complexity in the current healthcare environment (Jacobs et al., 20118). The concepts of change theory to implementing the current model of care in the healthcare setting should be considered. Leadership, especially leadership in health care, should be identified with strategic planning (Broome & Marshall 2021). Strategic planning also involves the concept and the skills of mobilizing young talents and teams that can implement initiatives through responding to the new requirements of the healthcare systems.
References
Auerbach, D. I., Staiger, D. O., & Buerhaus, P. I. (2018). Growing ranks of advanced practice clinicians—Implications for the physician workforce. New England Journal of Medicine, 378(25), 2358–2360. doi:10.1056/NEJMp1801869
Broome, M., & Marshall, E. S. (2021). Transformational leadership in nursing: From expert clinician to influential leader (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Springer.
Gerardi, T., Farmer, P., & Hoffman, B. (2018). Moving closer to the 2020 BSN-prepared workforce goal. American Journal of Nursing, 118(2), 43–45
Jacobs, B., McGovern, J., Heinmiller, J., & Drenkard, K. (2018). Engaging employees in well-being: Moving from the Triple Aim to the Quadruple Aim. Nursing Administration Quarterly, 42(3), 231–245.
Norful, A. A., de Jacq, K., Carlino, R., & Poghosyan, L. (2018). Nurse practitioner–physician comanagement: A theoretical model to alleviate primary care strain. Annals of Family Medicine, 16(3), 250–256.
Palumbo, M., Rambur, B., & Hart, V. (2017). Is healthcare payment reform impacting nurses’ work settings, roles, and education preparation? Journal of Professional Nursing, 33(6), 400–404.
Pittman, P., & Scully-Russ, E. (2016). Workforce planning and development in times of delivery system transformation. Human Resources for Health, 14(56), 1–15. doi:10.1186/s12960-016-0154-3. Retrieved from https://human-resources health.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s12960-016-0154-3
