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 home.
The organization strives to provide complete healthcare services to the older adults with the help of their advanced equipment and trained professionals and provide those facilities so that they may recover quick form 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 have interviewed Dr. Andronke Mohdi, the CEO of the IQHC and certified healthcare provider in Minnesota State, northeastern Iowa and a licensed practitioner of healthcare. 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 and has also received degrees of an RN and MBA. After her service in the filed, she decided to start her own business and opened her 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 was left with her two years old child. At that time she decided to do something in life and chose the profession of healthcare as she considered helping humankind holds 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 the excellent service. She considers her motivation to come from God and she seeks His help for her future endeavors. She told us that sometimes in her service she had to make unethical decisions and as a CEO she is pressurized to decide in favor 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 is striving for the best healthcare provision for the people in their homes, and she has no compromise in 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 she 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 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 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 same healthcare service to patients. The equipment the organization is using need to be updated with the passage of time and this update makes the provision more costly. Increasing cost of service by both organizational improvement and increasing cost of healthcare by government eventually increases cost for the end user who had to pay a high cost for their services. This increase in costs has affected the organization business and their market satisfaction rate.
The patient’s expectation from the organizations are increasing by 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 home services at less cost without compromising quality. This factor is forcing the organizations to focus on their quality and ensure patient medication safety. The patient’s demand for better healthcare has made it difficult for organizations to provide them what they need. The problem is even worse when government policies are imposed on the organizations. The private healthcare services need to be more patient-oriented and demand is driven to satisfy the needs of both government and patients.
The impact of social awareness about healthcare services are improving patient knowledge about their diseases. This factor is providing a positive impact on the healthcare delivery system of IQHC. Now patients are more aware of their medical condition, and they know how they can prevent complications if they can’t go to the hospitals. It is helping the healthcare providers as patients now already know what procedures are to be practiced to minimize the risks and what factors they should be concerned about their health that are important for their treatment. The disease information has also increased with the advent of social media, and the patients are now more aware of their potential problems and can keep track or their healthcare delivery.
The organization’s service delivery is changing by 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 the date of patient condition, their major diseases, deficiencies, medical history, cure history, and current progress of home-based medical care is 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 by the addition of this system. The organization faced difficulties and their productivity decreased as the staff they hired did not serve for longer tenures in the organization. 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 same services in fewer 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 like the social media awareness, which is increasing patient knowledge about their condition and they can help healthcare providers in minimizing 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.
