Question

Stakeholder Analysis

Stakeholder analysis is a very important aspect of healthcare strategic planning. Aspiring healthcare leaders need to be good at this. The assignment provides you with an opportunity to conduct your own stakeholder analysis for an actual community. This is an important exercise, so make the most of the opportunity. Let’s see who the key stakeholders are in your own healthcare marketplace.

Consider your own community, or a community in which you would someday like to serve as healthcare administrator. Look around the community thoroughly. Identify your primary and secondary stakeholders for the healthcare organization in the community, and explain their importance. For each stakeholder, explain why you included them and the process for choosing them for your community. Stakeholders can be identified by position or by organizational name (e.g., economic development officer, hospice organization, etc.).

Your assignment should be a minimum of two pages in length and should include a title page and reference page (title and reference pages do not count toward the total page requirement). To supplement your discussion, you should include at least two sources, and one should be your textbook. References and citations must be provided using APA style. All sources used must be referenced; paraphrased and quoted material must have accompanying citations.

Answer 1

The most important stakeholder in the healthcare system is the patient. Somehow, the patient has been converted from a person with an illness and needs medical care, to a person who is a potential financial asset to the facilitator stakeholders. Physicians have the privilege of helping patients who are ill get well. They also have an obligation to prevent disease. It is not only a privilege, it is an awesome responsibility. Physicians are medical doctors that provide medical care. Medicine is a princely profession. Physicians must be given to tools to provide efficient and effective care at an affordable price.

Without patients, there would not be a healthcare system. The conversion of patients to economic entities is partly a result of the advances in technology and partly the dysfunctional evolution of the healthcare system. CAT scans, MRI scans, and stress echocardiograms and others have served to make the patient a commodity. All of these test procedures generate revenue. The organization performing the testing generates revenue. If patients owned their healthcare dollar, prices for services were transparent, and physicians’ offices were able to compete with hospital systems for procedures that are presently not permitted in the physician offices, all the stakeholders would be driven to more accurate pricing and more efficient care.

All of us at one time or another are patients. Patients are typically citizens, and voters, and sometimes taxpayers. Policymakers have a fiduciary duty to this population, and the country’s policy framework is established to benefit patients. Patients receive care services from providers and are the beneficiary customers of the payors. Patients also may want to access information about their care via an electronic device (e.g., personal computer, mobile phone).

Policymakers establish the framework within which health care is provided to the country’s citizens. In this book, “policymaker” is a synonym for “ministry of health” or whatever jurisdictional entity is responsible for the health of the population. The policymakers aggregate data from patients, providers, and payors to develop population-level metrics that inform their health and health economic policies.

Providers operationalize care delivery within the policy framework. They provide health services to patients and maintain health information about them. The providers coordinate patient care with other providers as care team members. Many providers are independent businesses that must manage their own operations and finances.

Payors operationalize the financial elements of the policy framework. Payors enrol patients as beneficiaries. They procure care services from the providers on behalf of their patient beneficiaries. They also must take on the actuarial task of ensuring the financial sustainability of the care program. They report to policymakers.

Providers and payors are regulated by these policies and operate within them. Ideally, the policies are designed to maximize the health of the population within the country’s financial and resource constraints.

In financial terms, payors and providers have a customer/supplier relationship. Of course, in turn, patients may have a choice of payors, and so payors may have a supplier/customer relationship with their patient beneficiaries. To be sustainable, payors endeavour to minimize the costs of funding their portfolios of care services. This incentivizes payors to encourage and even invest in the uptake of healthy-living initiatives within their beneficiary population.

The relationships exist within the providers’ contextual relationship with policymakers as regulated professionals. In situations where care must be coordinated, providers also find themselves managing relationships with other members of the care team, as they collaborate on behalf of a shared patient.

As consumers, patients may be able to exercise purchase discretion regarding their choice of payors. In times of poor health, patients are often powerless consumers. When we are ill, we want to become healthy again. This is what makes the patient-provider relationship powerful, and underlies the moral and ethical imperatives that are important to it.