International Quality Home Care

Overview

The International Quality Home Care Organization (IQHC) is a quality health provider organization in Rochester, USA, which provides home healthcare services to people with diverse cultural backgrounds. The people who are unable to leave their homes due to medical reasons or other severe injuries are provided healthcare facilities in their homes so that they won’t have to physically visit the hospitals and receive their due medical care in the comfort of their homes.

The organization strives to provide complete healthcare services to older adults with the help of advanced equipment and trained professionals, and it provides those facilities so that they may recover quickly from their injury or disease. The organization has proved to include diversity in their service and has provided care to patients from all ethnic and cultural belongings.

I interviewed Dr. Andronke Mohdi, the CEO of the IQHC and certified healthcare provider in Minnesota State, northeastern Iowa, who is a licensed healthcare practitioner. Mohdi was born in Nigeria, and she moved to the US after the death of her first husband. She has completed her basic education in biophysics and got her doctorate in this subject. She has also received degrees as an RN and MBA. After her service in the field, she decided to start her own business and opened her own healthcare agency with the help of her husband. The motivation she had for starting this career originated after the death of her first husband when she was left with her two-year-old child. At that time, she decided to do something in life and chose the profession of healthcare as she considered helping humankind to hold a high level of virtue.

The main reason why she chose this profession was her high faith in God. She considers the help of God as the eternal source of strength. She believes that faith in God strengthens and heals our spirit and is the driving force that encourages us to strive for excellent service. She considers her motivation to come from God, and she seeks His help in her future endeavours. She told us that sometimes, in her service, she had to make unethical decisions, and as a CEO, she is pressured to decide in favour of these decisions, but she does not have any tolerance for people who cannot decide between right and wrong and have no integrity.

Discussion

When asked about the challenges the company is facing, Mohdi told us that it is so difficult to find the perfect staff for her organization. She thinks that quality staff that is good in their knowledge and technical skills of the field needs to be hired very carefully. Her organization strives to provide the best healthcare for the people in their homes, and she has no compromise on the quality of care delivered to the patients. The organization faces difficulties as the staff they hired do not stay in the jobs for longer periods. This makes the delivery of health care difficult for any medical organization as the organization has to hire new people with some work experience in the field who are willing to work in the organization for a longer period, and eventually, the end users, i.e., the patients, suffer.

Another challenge was the shift to the new Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system, which took about six months to be fully operational. She told us that they had to provide training to the staff in understanding the operation of the system and to shift to the new technology of record keeping. This change was hard to undergo, and the productivity of the company was reduced during the shift. However, after the implementation, the organization started benefiting from the new record-keeping system.

According to Mohdi, the organization is facing certain issues that are caused by environmental and social factors. The rising cost of healthcare has made it difficult for the organization to provide the same healthcare service to patients. The equipment the organization is using needs to be updated with the passage of time, and this update makes the provision more costly. Increasing the cost of service through both organizational improvement and increasing the cost of healthcare by the government eventually increases the cost for the end user, who has to pay a high cost for their services. This increase in costs has affected the organization’s business and its market satisfaction rate.

The patient’s expectations from the organizations are increasing due to the increased competition of healthcare providers. The patient apparently can never compromise on healthcare, and if there are multiple options available, they choose the best one that can provide them with home services at less cost without compromising quality. This factor forces organizations to focus on their quality and ensure the safety of patients’ medication. The patient’s demand for better healthcare has made it difficult for organizations to provide them with what they need. The problem is even worse when government policies are imposed on the organizations. Private healthcare services need to be more patient-oriented, and demand must be driven to satisfy the needs of both the government and patients.

The impact of social awareness about healthcare services is improving patient knowledge about their diseases. This factor has a positive impact on IQHC’s healthcare delivery system. Now, patients are more aware of their medical condition, and they know how they can prevent complications if they can’t go to the hospital. It helps healthcare providers as patients now already know what procedures are to be practised to minimize the risks and what factors they should be concerned about regarding their health that are important for their treatment. Disease information has also increased with the advent of social media, and patients are now more aware of their potential problems and can keep track of their healthcare delivery.

The organization’s service delivery is changing with the inclusion of the new EMR system. Now, the record-keeping of the patient is improved, and patient records are updated by the organization in real-time during their service. The healthcare providers are now up to date on the patient’s condition, major diseases, deficiencies, medical history, cure history, and current progress of home-based medical care, which are kept in these EMR records. This improvement has made healthcare delivery more efficient and patient-oriented. The nurses now easily perform necessary actions with patients, and their services are more effective and patient targeting.

Conclusions

The organization’s healthcare delivery system is improving with the addition of new advanced technology. The advanced EMR system has made record keeping easy, and home healthcare providers have improved their services with the addition of this system. The organization faced difficulties, and its productivity decreased as the staff it hired did not serve for longer tenures. The increasing costs of healthcare and medical services have made it difficult for the organization to provide quality services, but as quality cannot be compromised and patients demand the same services at lower costs, it is difficult for the organization to cope with it. Various environmental and social effects of government-imposed laws and policies are changing patient-oriented health care. However, it also has some positive effects, such as social media awareness, which increases patient knowledge about their condition and helps healthcare providers minimise the risks.

References

Bloom, N., Propper, C., Seiler, S., & Van Reenen, J. (2015). The impact of competition on management quality: evidence from public hospitals. The Review of Economic Studies, 82(2), 457-489.

Carayon, P., Wetterneck, T. B., Rivera-Rodriguez, A. J., Hundt, A. S., Hoonakker, P., Holden, R., & Gurses, A. P. (2014). Human factors systems approach to healthcare quality and patient safety. Applied Ergonomics, 45(1), 14-25.

International Quality Homecare. (2018). Internationalquality.com. Retrieved 4 April 2018, from http://www.internationalquality.com/

Interview: Dr. Andronke Mohdi (2018)

Paré, G., Raymond, L., de Guinea, A. O., Poba-Nzaou, P., Trudel, M. C., Marsan, J., & Micheneau, T. (2014). Barriers to organizational adoption of EMR systems in family physician practices: a mixed-methods study in Canada. International journal of medical informatics, 83(8), 548-558.

Rozenblum, R., Miller, P., Pearson, D., Marielli, A., Grando, M. A., Rozenblum, R., & Bates, D. W. (2015). Patient-centered healthcare, patient engagement, and health information technology: the perfect storm. Information technology for patient empowerment in healthcare, 3-22.