Introduction
The financial condition is one of the most significant factors that affect the development and potential opportunities of the organization. In the current case, the mental health unit of the Middlefield Hospital is profitless and loses patients each month. From these considerations, it is essential to provide a detailed plan to improve the financial performance of the company. The current report examines the primary challenges of the hospital and suggests three strategies to increase the profits of the mental health unit.
Challenges
At present, the Middlefield Hospital and the mental health unit specifically suffer from three primary problems: competitive environment, outdated healthcare systems, and low reimbursement. The first issue concerns the wellness center and other services that the new local facility provides. The second problem is more integrated into the hospital and regards outdated managed care contracts, high health plan costs, and stagnated quality improvement programs. Lastly, the increasing number of uninsured patients reduces the reimbursement value. Based on these challenges, it is possible to propose several business strategies to improve the financial performance of the hospital.
Recommendations
The first recommendation concerns the rivalry between the Middlefield Hospital and the new facility. According to the director of quality improvement, the reputation of the hospital is high regardless of the competitive environment. From these considerations, it might be profitable to establish a wellness center under the name of the Middlefield Hospital. At present, healthcare is gradually shifting from a reactive to a proactive approach with a focus on preventative measures (Njuguna et al., 2020). The research demonstrates the effectiveness of the model regarding the health of patients, financial stability, and practicality in terms of resources (Njuguna et al., 2020). In other words, the implementation of preventative measures benefits both the hospital and its customers.
Furthermore, the introduction of wellness programs might improve the satisfaction of employees and the reputation of the hospital. In the current case, it is possible to reduce the operational costs of health plans by providing other opportunities to the staff members. The research demonstrates that organizational wellness programs might improve the health of employees, reduce obesity rates, and monitor chronic diseases (Aldana, 2021). Ultimately, healthcare workers are highly prone to these problems due to the stressful environment; however, the implementation of wellness programs might be an efficient substitution for costly health plans. Furthermore, these policies might improve the reputation of the hospital (Aldana, 2021). It is particularly relevant to the mental health unit since, according to the employees, the quality of services is high, but the number of customers is decreasing. From these considerations, the enhanced reputation of the hospital might attract new customers and improve the financial performance of the mental health unit.
The second recommendation concerns the outdated equipment, policies of managed care contracts, and overall quality of services. These problems likely stem from ineffective IT management and data storage. The hospital requires a comprehensive clinical data warehouse that connects the healthcare, managerial, and financial information. As a result, it is essential to evaluate the digitalization level of the hospital and acquire the necessary assets. Consequently, a data warehouse might be used to convert all the clinical and managerial information into standardized data, which would solve the problem of managed care contracts and accessibility (Afshar et al., 2019). Ultimately, a data warehouse is a practical solution to address outdated systems and stagnated quality improvement programs.
Lastly, the third recommendation concerns uninsured patients and low reimbursement income. At present, a large number of hospitals are struggling due to the increasing cost of healthcare and the obligation to provide discounted services to uninsured patients (McMalcolm, 2020). It is a national healthcare problem, and there is no one solution to solve the issue. Nevertheless, the transparent indication of all costs upfront might improve the overall reimbursement (Cherry, 2019). Furthermore, it is essential to educate the patients concerning the importance of healthcare insurance (McMalcolm, 2020). As a result, these two practices might slightly improve the financial performance of the hospital.
Conclusion
The mental health unit of the Middlefield Hospital is currently profitless; however, it is possible to improve its financial performance by utilizing the described recommendations. The opening of a wellness center would allow the organization to retain its customers that are interested in the new local facility. Secondly, the establishment of a contemporary clinical data warehouse might improve the productivity of the hospital from healthcare, managerial, quality improvement, and financial perspectives. Lastly, transparent representation of costs and education of patients concerning the importance of insurance is an effective practice to improve the reimbursement revenue. Following these recommendations, the Middlefield Hospital might significantly improve its financial performance and restore the profitability of the mental health unit.
References
Afshar, M., Dligach, D., Sharma, B., Cai, X., Boyda, J., Birch, S., Valdez, D., Zelisko, S., Joyce, C., Modave, F., & Price, R. (2019). Development and application of a high throughput natural language processing architecture to convert all clinical documents in a clinical data warehouse into standardized medical vocabularies. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 26(11), 1364-1369. Web.
Aldana, S. (2021). 9 reasons hospital wellness programs are a smart business strategy. Web.
Cherry, S. (2019). How can you maximize patient reimbursements? Web.
McMalcolm, J. (2020). How-to: Provide care to the non-insured. Web.
Njuguna, B., Fletcher, S. L., Akwanalo, C., Asante, K., Baumann, A., Brown, A., … Vedanthan, R. (2020). Proactive prevention: Act now to disrupt the impending non-communicable disease crisis in low-burden populations. Plos One, 15(12), e0243004. Web.