Key Principles for Healthcare Industry Directors
1. Don’t pay hospitals and staff for keeping a patient in their care, pay them to keep them away (meaning healthy). At present we reimburse doctors and hospitals for visits, admission proceedures etc. But we don’t do much to ensure their doing them in a good way. Until we measure outcomes better, we can never improve. An example of how incentives can increase quality is the 2006-09 American Medicare pay-for-performance program.
Aged Care
Trends in Aged Care Services: Some Implications
Productivity Commission Research Paper, September 2008
Best-Practice and Change Management
Evidence in the Learning Organisation
Crites, Gerald E, McNamara, Megan C, Akl, Elie A and others, Health Research Policy and Systems, 7:4 March 2009
How do you ensure that organisational members are adopting work innovations in a timely fashion? Organisational leaders in healthcare have attempted to resolve this dilemma by offering specific solutions, such as Evidence-based Medicine, but organisations are still not systematically adopting evidence-based practice innovations as rapidly as expected by policy-makers (the knowing-doing gap problem).
How Can Decision Making be Improved?
Milkman, Katherione L, Chugh, Dolly and Bazerman, Max H, Harvard Business School Working Paper, August 2008
While scholars can describe how people make decisions, and can envision how much better decision-making could be, they still have little understanding of how to help people overcome blind spots and behave optimally.
Clinical Practice Improvement
Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Web-based step-be-step guide to service improvement methods
Easy Guide to Clinical Practice Improvement
NSW Health. Web-based PDF document designed to provide practical advice to clinicians and managers on how to use health care data to improve the quality and safety of health care in a systematic way
The Clinician’s Toolkit for Improving Patient care
NSW Health
Provides clinicians with a guide about the various strategies that are available to them for identifying problems with systems of care and with an individual clinician’s practice, and to give clinicians an overview of the ‘pragmatic’ scientific methodology that can be used to act upon the information that those methods provide, in order that care is continually improved.
Comparative Effectiveness
Comparative Effectiveness Research and Evidence-based Health Policy: Experiences from Four Countries
Chalkidou, Kalipso et al, The Milbank Quarterly, Vol. 87(2) 2009 pp. 339-367
Improving the efficiency, quality, and long-term sustainability health care system requires better evidence for decision making through comparative effectiveness research. In recent years, several other countries have established agencies to evaluate health technologies and broader management strategies to inform health care policy decisions. This article summarises experiences from Britain, France, Australia, and Germany.
General Management Links
High Performing Healthcare Systems: Delivering Quality by Design
Baker, G Ross, MacIntosh-Murray, Anu and Porcellato, Christina and others, Longwoods Publishing, 2008
An examination of leadership strategies, organisational processes and investments made to create and sustain improvement in healthcare
E-health Management
E-care management Blog (Deloitte’s)
The Medical Home: Disruptive Innovation for a New Primary Care Model
Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, 2008
In a medical home model, primary care clinicians and allied professionals provide conventional diagnostic and therapeutic services, as well as coordination of care for patients who require services not available in primary care settings. The goal is to provide a patient with a broad spectrum of care, both preventive and curative, over a period of time and to coordinate all of the care the patient receives.
Medical Training
Medical Training: First Farce Then Tragedy
Schwartz, Stephen, Centre for Independent Studies, 2009
Schwartz prescribes a dose of market forces for Australia’s medical workforce training.
Outcomes Driven Medicine / Performance Indicators
Measurement for Improvement: A Survey of Current Practice in Australian Public Hospitals
Brand, Caroline A et al., Medical Journal of Australia, Vol. 189(1) 7 July 2008 pp. 35-40
To identify patient safety measurement tools in use in Australian public hospitals and to determine barriers to their use.
In the Know: Using Information to Make Better Decisions – A Discussion Paper
Audit Office, February 2008
A Set of Performance Indicators across the Health and Aged Care System
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare for Health Ministers, June 2008
A set of performance indicators developed by the AIHW to support the agreements that will replace the 2003–2008 Australian Health Care Agreements by which the community could judge the performance of the health system as a whole. A focus has been on performance indicators that relate to outcomes for patients and clients, which would be suitable for public reporting, and for which data are mostly already available and reported.
Performance and Human Resources
360-Degree Physician Performance Review: A Toolkit
Councils of Academic Hospitals of Ontario, February 2009
It contains guidelines, suggested procedures, and sample communication and planning templates to help guide the implementation of a new process, which itself is intended as an instrument for facilitating enhanced quality of care and service delivery.
Rypple: Modern performance management.
Policy
Steering without Navigation Equipment: The Lamentable State of Australian Health Policy Reform
Richardson, Jeff, Centre for Health Economics, Monash Uni., March 2009
Fixing Health Care: The Professionals’ Perspective
Economist Intelligence Unit, March 2009
The EIU conducted a global survey of healthcare professionals in four key economies – the US, UK, Germany and India – about the issues they see as most urgent for their healthcare systems, and ascertain what they see as the best way forward for those systems.
Ambitions for Health: A Strategic Framework for Maximising the Potential of Social Marketing and Health Related Behaviour
UK Department of Health, 2008
Prevention
Australia: The Healthiest Country by 2020: A Discussion Paper
National Preventative Health Taskforce, 2008
Rural medicine
Why do Medical Graduates Choose Rural Careers?
Henry, John A, Edwards, Brian J and Crotty, Brendan, Rural and Remote Health, 9:1083 February 2009
Current medical student selection processes and medical course training experiences have failed to deliver sufficient medical practitioners with a commitment to rural medical practice. This study looked at those selection processes and within-training experiences deemed to promote the likelihood that, on graduation, medical students would pursue a medical career in rural communities.
Technology Adoption
From bench to bedside. What role for nurses in helping the NHS make better and quicker use of technological innovations? The adoption of innovative healthcare technologies with a proven ability to deliver increased patient benefits and significant efficiencies is perceived as slower and more variable in the NHS than other healthcare systems. Nurses are the largest workforce in the NHS and end users of much technology at the bedside. Drawing on a recently completed systematic review, this Policy Plus summarises what we know – and do not know – about the nurses’ role in adopting and assimilating such innovations into routine clinical care and considers the challenges for nurse leaders.
Workforce
Health Workforce in Australia and Factors Influencing Current Shortages
KPMG for the National Health Workforce Taskforce, Health Workforce Australia, April 2009
Future Health Analyst 
Leave a comment