Excellence in organizational operations sits right at the heart of improved healthcare delivery for better patient healthcare outcomes. This quality is the perfect complement for compassion and enthusiasm to provide the best living experience for humanity. In other words, compassion is not enough; efficient organizational protocols and procedures are a necessity.
There is no conversation on efficient organizational operations in healthcare that is complete without consideration or mention of the company's practice's administrative, clinical, legal, and financial aspects. These are the power points of a practice that account for the smooth management of the system and see to patient care.
The multivariate but inter-related aspects of your healthcare company are administered by personnel. Therefore, with your two-fold goal being healthcare company development through purposeful patient care being a proper motivation, the challenge is to conceive and actualize the professional development of your personnel.
Here, we present some considerations on healthcare personnel’s professional development as a strategy for improved patient healthcare outcomes:
Medical staff’s awareness about organizational standards: Every professional healthcare practitioner should centralize, operationalize and organize quality standards in their roles within their medical practice. Likewise, your company's core value of being result-oriented within the context of patient care and improvement also means that they would want to be aware of the specifics of the organization in terms of care standards.
To achieve this, you can choose to use a structured professional development plan. As a medical practice aiming at improving patient healthcare outcomes, you would see better key performance indicators in the long run. This may be from your decision to work with a professional development practitioner who can help your staff map out key areas of development to focus on as they engage with patients.
Skills and Improvement Survey: For every medical practitioner, such as doctors, nurses, and in-house medical coders, there are usually areas of targeted improvement. Fundamentally, these are usually not the same, especially when you consider the disparity of roles. Hence the need to diversify their professional development plans. For example, a nurse's professional development goals and plans would likely differ from those of other roles based on career lifespan. You may want to look into your resident nurses' confidence, knowledge, and patient communication levels and look for what competencies need to either be added or honed. For doctors, on the other hand, you may want to consider the expansion of their capacities in certain situations.
An instance is on the controversial issue of whether or not your doctors are supposed to assume the responsibility of assigning Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes. If you have such plans, different soft skills such as free patient expression and compassion, and hard skills such as code searching and entry, should probably be on your list for your doctors' empowerment. This consideration comes in handy in the case of new tasks or for improvements of their existing competencies. Thus, medical personnel will be ready to serve patients by being safe, competent, and compassionate practitioners.
Staying up to current with the trend in medical practice: The medical field reflects an ever-changing world. As such, practitioners within this walk of life have to be dynamic, requiring constant and continual learning. With the realization of this need comes a unique challenge: the necessity of encouraging health workers' local and national medical association participation; granting them autonomy to direct their continual education in alignment with their interests; providing tuition to augment funding for their advanced degrees; and granting access to discipline-centered literature.
In this article, you have seen the strategic role of healthcare personnel's professional development on patient healthcare outcomes. Likewise, it has shown the benefits of using quality improvement, improving science-based practices for better results, and the use of project management measures as an integral part of your business strategy.
REFERENCES
Felicia Sadler (2018). “3 Critical Components of Nursing Professional Development Across The Care Continuum.” Accessed on 3/11/2021 at https://www.relias.com/blog/3-components-of-professional-development-for-nurses#:~:text=In%20today%E2%80%99s%20healthcare%20landscape%2C%20professional%20development%20is%20not,are%20well-adjusted%20to%20the%20needs%20of%20the%20organization
Health Catalyst Editors (2020). “The Top Five Insights into Healthcare Operational Outcomes Improvement.” Accessed on 3/11/2021 at https://www.healthcatalyst.com/insights/healthcare-operations-top-5-improvement-insights/#pragmatic-proven-operations-insight