...I. Introduction Business-level strategy is an integrated and coordinated collection of commitments and actions that are used by firms to achieve a competitive advantage. The firms utilize core competencies in certain product markets. Under this strategy, firms specify their choices on how they plan to compete in individual product markets. It’s important that every firm develop a business-level strategy to create differences between its position and its competitors’ positions. The relationship between customers and business-level strategies is very important because customers are the source of the strategy’s success. It’s imperative that the firm differentiate who the customer will be (market segmentation), what are the customers’ needs, and how the company plans on satisfying the customers’ needs with core competencies. The relationship that a firm develops with its customers creates value and profitability. There are five business-level strategies that a firm can use to create and support its preferred strategic position against competitors. These include cost leadership, differentiation, focused cost leadership, focused differentiation, and integrated cost leadership/differentiation. Chapter 6 discusses these five strategies along with the risks that are associated with each. Chapter 6 discusses corporate level strategies. Corporate-level strategy focuses on the actions a firm takes to achieve a competitive advantage by choosing and managing a collection of different businesses...
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...practicing physicians and hospitals in the USA rely heavily on medical coders and billers for customer service, and more importantly: to get reimbursed for medical services provided to patients. (http://www.medicalcodingandbilling.com) Many Billing services currently operate to manage medical practice billing among other services offered, providing physicians with the benefit and convenience of outsourcing their billing duties to third parties in order to relieve medical professionals of the tedious and challenging work that entails medical billing and account collections. National statistics show that only about 70 percent of insurance claims, initially submitted on paper, are ever paid by insurance carriers. With the advancements of health information Systems and the increase requirement and demand for electronic submissions Claims have increased the reimbursement percentage tremendously. A survey by the American Hospital Association concluded that about 18% of medical billing and coding positions remain unfilled due to a lack of qualified candidates. Occupational trends and future outlook for Medical Billing and Coding Specialists remain at the most positive standpoint. Job Outlook and Employment for Medical Billers and Coders: Medical Billing and its related occupations continues to be the fastest growing opportunities in health care. Insurance companies and the government are spending more time and money researching and controlling claims’ fraud, abusive practices, and medical...
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...Reporting Practices and Ethics HCS/405 February 14, 2015 Reporting Practices and Ethics In health care businesses, the financial practices and ethics were considered to be the vital for health care organizational success. The financial and ethical practices are reinforced by healthcare companies for encouraging their objective statement. It had been to guarantee the submission and accuracy of healthcare, financial practices and ethics had the four types of financial management to make understanding to health care manager. It'd offer the significance of examples of ethical criteria and financial revealing practices. The four elements of financial management in healthcare business are planning, controlling, organizing and directing as well as decision-making. Planning could be the section of the company that is to identify the steps for success of a business must indeed be determined the targets before attaining the healthcare goals. The controlling is the second section of financial management that is to guarantee the plan for achieving the healthcare goals. Along with that, this element could recognize that perhaps the selected policy was best or perhaps not by obtaining the feedback from health care employees. Organizing and directing of financial management part involved the supervisor who had applied the medical assets for setting the master plan and for examining the progress of the program. The called that how the organizational assets were successful to carry out the...
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...many areas of the healthcare continuum to bring better healthcare results to their patients is being affected by the same new concepts many information management teams in other digital firms are investing in to bring their organization to the forefront. Like most digital firms, a healthcare organization can make use of having large amounts of data available and these organizations can use this data to help with many business decisions directly related to care management. Today, healthcare organizations are using one of the evolving concepts of cloud technology to bring information to the fingertips of the patient so they can participate more actively in managing their own personal healthcare. The concept of cloud computing in digital imaging for a healthcare organization involves the use of investing in a product which allows an organization to be able to share the digital images and the results of those images to the patient, physicians, and any other authorized healthcare continuum the patient and physician feel are valuable to provide the best care. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (http://csrc.nist.gov) gives the definition of cloud computing as follows… Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapid provisioned and released with minimal management effort or...
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...HCA-24 Contempory Issues in Healthcare America is facing a shortage; a shortage of Physician’s. “The Council of Graduate Medical Education released a report predicting a shortage of about 85,000 physicians by 2020.” (Cross, 2007) With the start of Affordable Health Care and the increase in the aging population there are just not enough providers to go around. In this essay we will discuss how the shortage affects healthcare from a business aspect; how non-profit and profit organizations impacted, what the responsibilities of the management staff is, and what rules and standards the financial management must address with this problem. In, the end we may not have a answer to this problem but we will have a better understanding of what the financial management must juggle in order to run a successful department or organization. The shortage of physicians is likely going to affect every aspect of healthcare. Profit and Nonprofit organization will both be affected some ways similar and in some ways different. Not-for-profit organizations, “are owned by the entire community rather than by investor-owners,” and profit organizations, “earn profits that are distributed t the investor-owners of the firms or reinvested in the firm for the long term benefit of these owners.” (Cleverly, 2011, pg. 8) The Affordable Health Care System has made a large impact on how organizations are reimbursed which is the major interest to both organizations. The shortage comes at a bad time...
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...Pay for Performance Incentive Programs in Healthcare: Market Dynamics and Business Process Executive Briefing AUTHOR Geoffrey Baker, MBA President, Med-Vantage® Inc. 1 California Street, Suite 2800 San Francisco, California 94111 CONTRIBUTORS John Haughton, MD, MS Founder, DocSite LLC 540 Main Street Winchester, Massachusetts 01890 Peter Mongroo Director, Healthcare Industries Markets Oracle Corporation 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, California 94065 A Research Report sponsored by ViPSSM, Inc. in partnership with Med-Vantage® 2003 Table of Contents Introduction.......................................................................................................................2 Goals and Motivations behind Pay for Performance..................................................................4 Market Adoption .................................................................................................................5 Funding and Incentives .......................................................................................................7 Measuring Performance: Physicians and Hospitals..................................................................10 P4P Operations and Business Processes for Health Plans.........................................................12 Key Lessons Learned and Critical Success Factors ..................................................................14 Conclusion...........................................................
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...Information Technology (IT) is increasingly being deployed and used in healthcare facilities to facilitate the communication of information across different healthcare teams and external insurance payers. The underlying assumption underpinning the introduction of IT in healthcare is that, improvements in information flow will eventually translate into improved quality of care (Mort M, 2009).The US Healthcare system is slowly moving toward Electronic Health Records. As mandated by the government all healthcare establishments need to be complaint by 2014 as per this report ( ref).In IT's infancy, healthcare organizations used it for limited payroll and accounting functions. Today, healthcare organizations can use technology for direct deposit of their payroll, receiving payments from insurance providers, remote patient monitoring, clinical data processing and remote delivery of diagnoses (Bernstien, 2007). At every step of its evolution, IT has become more affordable, more powerful, more reliable, and more accessible and above an all much more versatile in the amount of applications than it was conceived for (Bernstien, 2007). The challenges faced by the industry are on multiple fronts, including rising costs and inconsistent quality (McGlynn et.al, 2003). Health information technology, especially electronic health records has the potential to improve overall quality and effectiveness of healthcare providers (Chaudhry, 2006). Over the last few years US policy makers with help of...
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...The entire health care industry has been experiencing immense challenges. Given the current and historic success of Mayo, what does Mayo need to do from an HR perspective to maintain this standard of excellence? This case identifies the strategies used by Mayo to achieve excellence in employee and patient satisfaction. The case describes how this complex service organization fosters a culture that exceeds customer expectations and earns deep loyalty from both customers and employees. The role of HR is analyzed to explain how strategic HRM enables the organization to achieve its strategic business objectives. INTRODUCTION Mayo Clinic is the first and largest integrated, not-for-profit group practice in the world. Doctors of every medical specialty work together to care for patients, joined by common systems and a philosophy that "the needs of the patient come first." More than 3,300 physicians, scientists and researchers and 46,000 allied health staff work at Mayo Clinic, which has sites in Rochester, Minnesota, Jacksonville, Florida, and Scottsdale/Phoenix, Arizona. For many decades, Mayo Clinic has been ranked as one of the top medical institutions in the world. Over the past few years, the entire health care industry has been experiencing immense challenges. Mayo is not immune to these challenges and faces the risk of losing critical components of its culture and overall tradition of excellence that have been at the core of its success. Given the current and historic success...
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... 1.1 a. What are some of the industries in the healthcare sector? Some of the industries in the healthcare sector are health insurance, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, medical equipment and supplies and health services. Others include education institutions, government and private research agencies. b. What is meant by the term healthcare finance as used in this book? Healthcare finance is a term used in this book to describe accounting and financial management principles and practices used to ensure the financial well-being of health care organizations. c. What are the two broad areas of healthcare finance? The two broad areas of healthcare finance are accounting and financial management. Accounting is the recording of financial transactions concerning a business or organization, providing a summary of transactions. Financial management is the use of theory, principles, and concepts developed to help managers make better financial decisions. d. Why is it necessary to have a book on healthcare finance as opposed to a generic finance book? While each service industry has a certain definitive characteristic, the health service industry is different to most others. Non-profit corporations dominate the health service industry either by government or privately. Third parties such as insurance companies, employers and government programmes are the ones that make the majority of the payments to healthcare providers over individuals. The application of finance...
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...environments. Also it will describe the financial structure of the financial environment. Along with identifying the policies unique to each of the financial environment, and also to identify the financial management practices prevalent in the financial environment. Then it will be explained why the effective financial management is more difficult in health care than in other industries. First we will talk about is the Health Management Associates, Inc. that was founded in 1977. The Health Management Associates was founded to own, also leased and then managed the hospitals throughout the United States. As of the HMA, they operate about fifty nine hospitals in fifteen states with approximately eighty eight hundred licensed beds. Company employs around thirty two thousands associates and hosts a total medical staff of approximately eight thousands physicians. HMA is a for profit organization, with that the profit organization is with the three key features of investor-owned corporations. The owners aka known as the stockholders of the business are well defined and they exercise control of the firm by voting for directors. The residual earnings of the business belong to the owners or the stake holders. Management is then responsible only to the stockholders for the profitability of the firm. Lastly, the investor-owned corporations are subject to taxation at the local, state, and federal levels. HMA vision states will lead the hospital industry...
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...(hospitals were plaintiffs in only 6 percent. These numbers understate the burden of hospital antitrust litigation because most filed claims do not result in a published judicial opinion).” Hospital is a business that provides medical service to patients and there will always be competitors that produce social benefits. For example, Medical Malpractice is one of the major area that fail to provide quality health care medical treatment to patients, the victims of medical malpractice seek compensation for their physical or emotional injuries, or both, through a Negligence action. When patients suffered an injury, which he or she should be compensated, the reason for his or her injuries was because the physician’s violation of the standard of care. However, although the physicians is the cause of his or her injuries like according to (Farlex, 2012) “To protect themselves against the massive costs of such claims, physicians purchase malpractice insurance. Physicians' malpractice premiums total billions of dollars each year and add substantially to the cost of health care in the United States. In some specialties, such as obstetrics, 50 percent of the cost for medical services goes for the provider's malpractice premiums. Many physicians, faced with the rising tide of malpractice premiums, practice "defensive medicine" by ordering tests and procedures that might not be necessary, so that the records will show that they did all they could. Several studies have estimated the cost of defensive...
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...potential conflict of interest that may exist between the internal and external stakeholders, whether Dr. DoRight has fulfilled his ethical duty by reporting the illegal procedures, describe the deontology and utilitarianism principals and apply them to the ethical dilemma Dr. DoRight faces in this case. Internal And External Stakeholders that Dr. DoRight Deals With In A Daily Basis A hospital President is responsible for attaining and maintaining patient care, safety, education and community service goals. Professionals in this position are accountable for improving health status in the community as a whole. They also ensure hospital objectives are met through the process of selection, development, organization, motivation, management, evaluation and the promotion of human resources. A hospital President manages the...
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...Three Ideas That May Improve the Performance of Healthcare Abstract This paper explores eight published articles, and one book that report on results from research conducted on three big ideas that represent great opportunities to improve the performance of healthcare organizations. Three articles explain the helpfulness of virtual teaming, two articles and one book explains the benefits of outsourcing, and the last three articles explain why customer relationship management, also known as CRM, is a helpful resource. This paper will define the management practice or breakthrough idea, discuss the expected impact on improved patient outcomes, higher levels of customer satisfaction, and identify the critical success factors associated with implementing these programs in a health services organization. These management practices or breakthrough ideas, in my judgment, will be ranked the greatest, second greatest, and third greatest potential benefit for healthcare organizations. Healthcare is one of the biggest organizations around. Because of its size, and the many departments within a healthcare cooperation there is much need for organization between management, staff and their patients. There are many ways to make sure that a healthcare system operates smoothly. I agree with Martin Van Buren when he stated that it is easier to do a job right, then to explain why you didn’t. In this paper there will be three ideas that may get the job done right such as, virtual teams...
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...Applications in Healthcare Hian Chye Koh and Gerald Tan A B S T R A C T Data mining has been used intensively and extensively by many organizations. In healthcare, data mining is becoming increasingly popular, if not increasingly essential. Data mining applications can greatly benefit all parties involved in the healthcare industry. For example, data mining can help healthcare insurers detect fraud and abuse, healthcare organizations make customer relationship management decisions, physicians identify effective treatments and best practices, and patients receive better and more affordable healthcare services. The huge amounts of data generated by healthcare transactions are too complex and voluminous to be processed and analyzed by traditional methods. Data mining provides the methodology and technology to transform these mounds of data into useful information for decision making. This article explores data mining applications in healthcare. In particular, it discusses data mining and its applications within healthcare in major areas such as the evaluation of treatment effectiveness, management of healthcare, customer relationship management, and the detection of fraud and abuse. It also gives an illustrative example of a healthcare data mining application involving the identification of risk factors associated with the onset of diabetes. Finally, the article highlights the limitations of data mining and discusses some future directions. K E Y W O R D S ■ ■ Healthcare management ■ Customer...
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...Why Healthcare Must Embrace Cloud Computing Regulatory compliance for the healthcare industry is a hot-button issue. The overriding compliance requirements that this industry faces are dictated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), enacted by Congress in 1996. HIPAA was designed to protect the privacy of patients’ medical records and restrict who has access to them. Regulatory compliance for the healthcare industry is a hot-button issue. The overriding compliance requirements that this industry faces are dictated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), enacted by Congress in 1996. HIPAA was designed to protect the privacy of patients’ medical records and restrict who has access to them. The latest HIPAA standards surrounding the security and privacy of patient data makes many in the healthcare industry understandably cautious about adopting new technologies. In the past, healthcare companies preferred to keep any electronic data concerning business operations and patient care behind a secure firewall. Now, HIPAA omnibus and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) requirements stipulate everyone in the healthcare industry begin migrating patient records and other data to cloud computing. Essentially, by 2015, all medical professionals with access to patient records must utilize electronic medical and health records (EMR and EHR), or face penalties. A recent study by the firm MarketsandMarkets indicates that...
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