FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

Financial Management of Hospitals

Financial Management of Hospitals

Introduction

Healthcare in Western societies is at a turning point. The enormous medical and public health advances of the last half century have extended life spans and improved quality of life for millions of people. The costs, however, have had an equally rapid ascent, leading many to believe that they have created a sustainable system. Personalized medicine, the subject of science fiction only a few years ago, has increasingly become a reality. One's genetic and proteomics profiles can be used to predict and treat diseases with an individually tailored approach. Paradoxically, population based health concerns, which address the health needs, not of individuals, but large groups (or populations), have become increasingly important to understand, how to improve the health status, and, quality of life across communities, countries, and continents. Personalized medicine and population health are putting further demands on an already strained healthcare system. All the issues related to Healthcare Industry will be discussed in detail.

Background of Healthcare Industry

What does complexity science offer to this stressed system? In the UK, USA and Canada, members of the healthcare sector are looking to complexity science for insights to address the public policy, clinical and management challenges of healthcare. For policy makers, complexity science provides a new way to understand public policy as being coherent across populations while, at the same time and paradoxically, 'inconsistent' in application because it allows for variation in response to local needs. This creates tensions for public policy makers, which have often seen coherence, and, consistency as synonymous just as equity and, equality has often been taken to mean the same. In practice, the National Health Service (in the UK) has used design principles inspired by complexity science (hereafter 'complexity principles' in their redesign of the delivery of healthcare; while the Institute of Medicine (in the USA) has drawn to understand, and, address quality shortcomings in healthcare delivery. The clinical applications of complexity science range from relationship-centered care to using fractal geometry for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac conditions. In practice, most of the clinical applications are still in their infancy but show great promise for diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of diseases, especially chronic diseases. Indeed, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2009 chose complexity science as its theoretical frame for the study of chronic disease management (Barger, 2003).

In terms of health care management and leadership of health care organizations, complexity science has been a transformation in many health care organizations through understanding distributed network models of control and authority. In practice, jobs have been redesigned, care delivery modes have been altered, and, patient safety initiatives have applied complexity science-inspired principles, to address issues, such as hospital acquired infections. Clearly, then, complexity science is impacting healthcare across the Western world. The three factors which are general policy, clinical practice, and management of healthcare organizations are important. They play a vital role to outline how complexity science has been applied (or at least discussed) in each; and ...