Question

Scenario: You are a departmental manager in a large community hospital in an urban area. Your organization consists of both outpatient and inpatient services. Admissions data shows that 34% of your clientele is age 65 or older. An additional 16% of your clientele is medically disabled and utilizes Medicare insurance. Many of them have repeated admissions due to poor management of their chronic conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), congestive heart failure (CHF), and diabetes. Thus, a high proportion of your reimbursement comes from Medicare. Your organization will be heavily affected by the upcoming Pay for Performance Initiative (P4P), scheduled to become effective in 2015. Your executive director has charged you and your fellow managers with devising strategies to prepare for the coming P4P initiative.

How do you envision this preparation affecting work with/for other stakeholders?

What are your suggestions for this organization to prepare for P4P?

Answer 1

I would envision this preparation affecting work with/for other stakeholders because none of the stakeholders in the form of staff would be happy with Pay for Performance Initiative (P4P) as this initiative ignores the difficulty faced by the staff on attending to large number of patients on a daily basis and handling clientele and also sorting out Medicare insurance issues of the clientele, thereby giving them best services. Since the staff works extra hard and ensures that best care is provided to the patients, they deserve better than P4P initiative since a lot of things such as dedication and employee motivation is overlooked in such a pay strategy adopted by the company. In order to prepare for P4P, the organization must take care of the needs and preferences of the staff as well and take their opinion as well on this, whether they would like this change to happen or not. After careful consideration of the opinion of employees and medical staff, decision must be taken by the organization to either go ahead with P4P initiative or not.