Organizational Functions, Processes, and Behaviors in High-Performing Organizations

High performing healthcare organizations acquire a degree of excellence across various measures of performance and departments (Dess & Robinson, 1984). According to organizational science, the high performing healthcare facilities may be measured if the characteristics relating to its high performance are identified and explored in regards to the organizational functions, processes, and behavior. These features relating to the organizational high performance are to some extent regarded complicated and thus an exclusive quantitative strategy may not be successful enough to justify the identity involved in the descriptive or significant contextual dynamics.

Various studies (Andrews, Boyne, & Walker, 2006), suggest that leadership is such a significant element in organizational performance. According to the studies, the essence of disciplined, diligent and hardworking leaders drives the organizational performance from good to great. The leaders assist the organizations to recruit the right personnel team, which focuses on developing an effective strategy and creates a disciplined culture aimed at driving the organizational to its effectual desired position. These leaders tend to influences various activities and practices that when employed by the organization, may entail a strategy development performance and guide the distribution of resources within the systems departments with the aim of advancing the organizational performance in equal measure.

Moreover, it is also regarded that the significance of spreading more reliable and cost-effective care is based on the processes geared towards identification of these improvement areas and care delivery structures and transforming the identified strategies from high-performing systems to local delivery organizations. The high-performing organizations always incline the culture of understanding of the current environment with the aim projecting towards the future. This move always sustains a constant rhythm on various environmental factors that have many impacts in relation to the political (government), social (population), technological (devices and information) and economic (market segment) with which these organizations may start to generate meaning of the trends. In response, the behavior sets the organizational course and pursue various imperatives that best place the organization in a dynamic environment of healthcare provision.

How Organizational Functions, Processes, and Behaviors Support and Affect Outcome Measures

Organizational functions, processes, and behaviors may support or affect the performance outcome of the organization, depending on how successfully and efficiently the supervisory relationships and workflow impacts on the output. The outcome measures management consists of various goal-setting undertakings and periodic evaluations by the organizational managers in the reporting hierarchy. Insufficiently established and defined procedures and processes, which may be constantly applied throughout the organization, may unsuccessfully strive in accomplishing the set goals and objectives such as improving product and service quality for end-user patients.

It is also recognized that healthcare systems are complicated organizations comprised of multiple diverse stakeholders (health practitioners, government, patients, and public). Each of these stakeholders is associated with a sequence of accountability relationships. The accountability aspect is looked into in two broad ways, which is, execution of an account and sanctions or rewards for the held accountable party involved. In response, therefore, whatever the case, the accountability relationship is to function just right to ensure that no isolation of any system of performance information and thus the fundamental role of outcome measures is appropriately held.

Outcome measures always pursue to monitor, assess and communicate the degree to which certain concepts of an organizational system achieve the key goals and objectives. Notably, the set goals and objectives are usually summarized under a narrowed number of headings – for instance, health deliberated on people by the healthcare organization, its awareness to public preferences, the financial safeguard it provides and its efficiency. Health usually relates to its outcomes that are safeguarded by organizational functions, process, and behavior to its responsiveness with the urge of improving the accomplishments of their goals and objectives.

Information plays a hub role in the ability of a healthcare system to efficiently safeguard advanced health for its patients. The information may be applied in various diverse approaches, for instance, tracing the public health, supervising healthcare safety and measures, identifying suitable treatment methods for the organizational patients, enhancing professional improvement, ensuring managerial control, and promotion of the healthcare system accountability to the public.

These are just some of the ideal efforts that the organizations ensure in the role performance measures in guiding the decisions that multiple stakeholders – practitioners, government, patients, and public – employ in enabling better outcomes in healthcare system and organizations.

Quality and Safety Outcomes and their Associated Measures

In regards to various studies (Laschinger & Leiter, 2006), the healthcare industry is marked with multiple administrative and regulatory complications that render it a little hard for the healthcare systems to accomplish their overall goals and objectives – improving the patient experience, improving the health of populations, and minimization of healthcare acquisition costs. These complications experienced in outcomes advancement are predominantly challenging as health systems measure and report on dozens of quality and safety outcomes periodically. However, it’s also renowned that healthcare organizations are well capable of managing these complications by regarding deeply the outcome measures.

According to Laschinger and Leiter (2006), there exist numerous quality and safety outcomes that range from alterations in blood pressure to hypertension to patient-reported outcome measures. In a detailed discussion, some of these outcomes and their associated measures include:

The Effectiveness of Care. This outcome measure usually accesses two components, that is, the submission of the organization to the best practice healthcare recommendations, and attained outcomes (for example, lower cases of hospital readmissions due to heart failure).

Mortality. It is always considered the most significant population health outcome measure. This is because, for instance, the consideration of MultiCare health system’s initiative that aimed at improving the care, cost, and experience of pneumonia patients, actually minimized the disease’s mortality rate by 30%.

Re-admissions. Considered very expensive and to some extent preventable, readmission entails following a prior hospitalization is a common outcome measure. For instance, the MultiCare initiative reduced the cases of hospitals readmission by 29% obtained from real-time feedback and enhanced patient follow-up and consistent communication.

Safety of Care. The outcome pertained to the safety of care usually related to medical errors and mistakes. Skin breakdown and hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) are the usual general safety of care outcome measures.

Patient Experience. The feedback received from patients usually fall within the patient experience outcome measure classification. The feedback provided may offer a more accurate measure of patient satisfaction and immediate data for local service development.

Timeliness of Care. This outcome measure evaluates the patients’ accessibility to healthcare. For instance, a healthcare organization aimed at designing a more efficient and accurate system for evaluating sepsis may create an analytics platform to trace the timeliness of care delivery.

Efficient Use of Medical Imaging. A resourceful exploration of medical imaging is a progressively significant outcome measure as suggested by the European Science Foundation, “Medical imaging plays a central role in the global healthcare system as it contributes to the improved patient outcome and more cost-efficient healthcare in all major disease entities.”

Performance Issues/ Opportunities Associated with Quality and Safety Outcomes they affect

Quality and safety outcomes in healthcare is a creation of cooperation amid the healthcare practitioners and the patients in a supportive environment. Certain regarded personal factors of the practitioners and the patient, and factors relating to the healthcare organization, healthcare system, and the broader environment influences the degree to which the quality and safety are rendered (Laschinger & Leiter, 2006). However, to ascertain quality and safety outcome, there exist various opportunities and issues related to organizational functions, processes, and behaviors.

In any professional organization, the essential staff is made up of professionals whose socialization usually occurs during pre-employment, leading to a strong professional identification. However, most healthcare organizations seem to have little or no socialization of their own professional workforce with the steer of advancing the organizational identification. The difference in the professional identification and practices and caregiving behavior affects the effectiveness involved in the interdisciplinary collaborations that aim at improving the quality and safety outcomes.

Various anticipations held by healthcare personnel always tend to affect their performance. The anticipations should be identified as that help the healthcare sector to mitigate the various issues that affect it, not least multifaceted dynamic work environments concerning many careers and stakeholders and strong value-based impacts. As suggested by Laschinger and Leiter (2006), these issues define both the content of the psychological convention as well as the procedure by which occupational behaviors are influenced.

Patient activists are defined as the clinical workers who handle issues associated with care and service of patients and families experience while in the hospital. The activists’ specialty is not medical mistakes, but rather focuses in taking care of the feelings, concerns, challenges, complaints, grievances, and the dignity of patients, families and hospital staff who inhabit the complex organizational world of hospitals.

It is, therefore, a joint submission in ensuring quality and safety outcomes through the collaboration and cooperation among healthcare providers, enhancement of supportive visionary leadership, appropriate planning, education and training, convenience and availability of resources, effective controlling and managing of resources, and employees and processes.

A Strategy for Ensuring that all Aspects of Patient Care are measured and that Knowledge is shared with the Staff

In 1994, a white paper, America’s Health in Transition: Protecting and Improving Quality, was issued by the Institute of Medicine’s Council to address a strategy that outlines the measurement of quality patient care. The strategy directed at health practitioners’ commitment to accomplishing the highest degree of health promotion, diseases prevention, and health care for patients and the society as a whole (National Research Council, 1994). The strategy suggested that healthcare quality must and can be measured, monitored, and improved at any instance. The policyholders involved – whether public, private, state or federal levels- must always maintain their firm position on the application of the techniques and tools geared at measuring and improving the quality of health.

The knowledge about the strategy is then shared among the members, where each member is required to constantly modify and reassess the strategy for quality effectiveness. The members would be required to continually develop other approaches and refinement of the old ones if need be. Likewise, reliable, objective and non-political monitoring and reporting of quality in health and health care must be expressed clearly and strongly applied as change occurs (Katon & Kleinman, 1981).

References

Andrews, R., Boyne, G. A., & Walker, R. M. (2006). Subjective and objective measures of             organizational performance: An empirical exploration. Public service performance:          Perspectives on measurement and management, 14-34.

Dess, G. G., & Robinson, R. B. (1984). Measuring organizational performance in the absence of objective measures: the case of the privately‐held firm and conglomerate business unit.        Strategic management journal, 5(3), 265-273.

Katon, W., & Kleinman, A. (1981). Doctor-patient negotiation and other social science strategies            in patient care. In The relevance of social science for medicine (pp. 253-279). Springer,        Dordrecht.

Laschinger, H. K. S., & Leiter, M. P. (2006). The impact of nursing work environments on patient             safety outcomes: The mediating role of burnout engagement. Journal of Nursing   Administration, 36(5), 259-267.

National Research Council. (1994). America’s health in transition: protecting and improving        quality.