Wednesday, January 23, 2013

How To Calculate HealthCare Value

By Gabrielle Lambert


Any good health care system must aim at offering high HealthCare Value to all the patients as an ultimate goal. Value refers to the health outcomes achievements for patients relative to the cost they incur for the treatment. It is this value that is of benefit to the both the patients in need of the health services and to the providers offering the services. The health system also gains in having economic stability.

It usually defines the framework for which performance is measured and therefore improvement in health care delivery. It however still remains not well measured and understood. Value must always be defined while considering the customer and if a system is to run properly, the rewarding system should be based on how much value is created.

Since the measure of value dependents more on the output and outcomes but not the amount of inputs into the system, the quality of the outcomes in health is an important factor to note. The processes in between the course of service delivery and the volume of the work that is done in process of management are not useful if the end results are not satisfactory.

In the medicine, there is no single outcome considered to be the standard to which all process must end up in. It is because some condition may lack a definite cure while other do have a known treatment. The issue of calculating coast is also challenging because every step in the cycle of treatment must be considered and the costs cumulatively added. The best way to decrease costs is not only making the services cheap but to spend more in the services decreasing need of them.

The care for a patient or a medical condition normally involves many specialties, numerous investigations and interventions. In measuring in such cases, the costs must include all the different care providers used in the cycle of care. The benefit of any intervention that might have been done and had positive outcomes will depend on how effective the rest of the other interventions were for the management.

The accountability in a system must involve and hold each provider responsible depending on the role played. The solution for better efficiency involves integrating these provider so that the work together toward a common goal. On then will each service account for the better good of the overall results and outcomes.

Dealing with patients who have medical conditions like diabetes which usually come with other medical conditions as complications such as kidney failure or hypertension is a challenge. This factor is measured through calculating each disease differently. This also helps access the ability of the system to handle different medical conditions.

The structure and information systems currently offering health care has made HealthCare Value difficult to measure. Individual providers find it hard to determine accurately the exact figure of the services they offer because they work separately not knowing how the other providers perform. Faulty structures have lead to physicians failing to take responsibility for results while shifting blame to outside players.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment