Question

Please review Chapter 8 of Evidence-Based Management in Healthcare before responding to the below prompt.

Now that you understand the value and importance of EBM and critical thinking, what changes would you recommend in your healthcare organization? How would you go about implementing EBM into a new healthcare business?

Answer 1

Evidence-based management is applying the scientific facts and results of top sound researches for decision making in the patients treatment and care. Mostly in medical field managers don’t use research evidence for making decisions and physicians believe more on their old knowledge and felt experiences to decide the line of treatment. This mind set requires change.

In a healthcare organizations or hospitals where physicians nurses and other technical specialized staff work as a team for patient treatment and care, cultural transformation including alterations in values beliefs and behaviors are needed for implementing EBM in it. This will require existence of transformational leadership and active change management.

It will incorporate training and development, provision and access of enabling technology, open communication, performance management and constant adaptability to new practices based on empirical researches. The change strategy should focus on creating work culture that is characterized by:

• Trade off of operational efficiency and patient safety in providing care
• Building trust among people in organization
• Participation of team members in designing their tasks and its sequence
• Reward programs for those adopting evidence based medicine
• Establishment of knowledge management system for filing all decisions of hospital managers and physicians and assessing it in light of research evidence. Organizational need to be constantly learning.

With above essentials in place, EBM will be adopted seamlessly.