Tag: Hospital Authorities

Hospital Management

Dr. S.T. Han, Director in the World Health Organization said, ‘You may have the best infrastructures, the most contemporary and up to date technological innovation, and the best management and funding techniques, but without well-motivated and experienced employees, none of these will have valuable impact on the health of people’. Despite the changes and enhancement in medical care distribution designs and techniques, many nations are still relatively conventional when it comes to individual resources. This area it seems still continues to be just like how it was more than 50 years ago. This is because, while different areas of healthcare professionals are progressively helping the personal interests within their career, few are seeking it with the objective of helping the medical care system as a whole. The outcome is that the inspiration for health care professionals continues to be that of self-interest, rather than to enhance the lives of the community.

But with that in mind, U.S. hospitals are currently going through a transformation and for doctors, highly disruptive change in their management viewpoint. Prior to the 1980’s, medical centers were refunded on the basis of their costs, so management’s focus was on having the beds and equipment necessary to increase occupancy.  Physicians were the principle customers and medical centers drawn them by offering the facilities and sources they needed to confess and manage their sufferers.

The change in the 80’s from a cost restoration to potential transaction system changed that strategy.  With the introduction of a single transaction to cover an entire episode of care, medical centers had an incentive for shorter lengths of stay and more effective use of resources.  Directors began moving their attention from offering physician-friendly facilities to the functional performance of the hospital models and process that reinforced physician decision-making.  This new strategy highlighted improving the use of analytic and healing resources employed in care distribution. Individual care choices, however, stayed the exclusive region of the doctor.  What mattered was the effective use of the hospital’s resources; the doctor choices that created the demand for those resources were not definitely handled.

Hospital Mergers

In an article in New York Times, the Supreme Court gave power to the Federal Trade Commission or FTC to block hospital mergers so it could limit the authority of public hospital management from immunity to federal antitrust laws. The undivided decision renewed the power of the F.T.C. to task the merging of the only two medical centers in Albany, Ga. Some professionals said the decision could mean that medical centers will have to be more aware of antitrust concerns when they get together with other medical service suppliers to form so-called responsible care companies, as known for in the new medical care law. “I think this is going to restrict one of the collections of protection that the A.C.O.’s will have,” said David Dranove, lecturer of wellness market control at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern School.

Various medical centers are consolidating now, often disagreeing that mixing increases the range of services and makes them more effective. But merging can also increase the hospitals’ influence with insurance suppliers, resulting in higher prices. In the Georgia situation, the F.T.C. had tried to prevent the acquisition of HCA Holdings’ Palmyra Medical Center by Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, which is owned by the Hospital Authority of Albany-Dougherty County.

States are usually exempted from government antitrust regulations, and that resistance can increase to regional government regulators. Both the Federal District Court in Georgia and the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided that the Albany deal was exempt because it was under the auspices of the county hospital authority. But the Supreme Court said that regional government regulators be eligible for a antitrust resistance only when they are acting pursuant to a clearly articulated state plan to restrict competitors. And that was not the situation in Georgia. “We hold that Atlanta has not clearly articulated and affirmatively indicated a plan to allow hospital regulators to make products that considerably reduce competitors,” Rights Sonia Sotomayor had written for a legal court.