Healthcare administrators are responsible for coordinating and implementing various policies, procedures, and guidelines that affect the work of healthcare providers. Administrators must be well-versed in policy-making and understand the challenges they may encounter when integrating policy into their organization’s work. Some of the challenges encountered are when integrating state or federal policy into the internal policies of the health care organizations. The involvement of government policies is necessary to increase the performance of the health care systems. While these policies are vital in creating efficiency in the healthcare systems, conceptual, empirical, and resource challenges affect the performance levels.
The conceptual challenges are concerned with the lack of significant clarity. During integration policies, it is important to incorporate guiding questions such as the type of integration needed, how it will be implemented, and the outcome to expect (Raus, 2020). Without addressing these questions, confusion may arise when the policies are implemented due to the complexity and ideology of the concepts used. For instance, the state policy may require the hospital administration to integrate policies that would help regulate the increased spending within sustainable limits. The objective will not be achieved if these policies are not clearly defined in an all-encompassing theoretical framework.
The empirical challenges refer to any viable evidence that moves beyond ideology. This means that the state policies being integrated into the healthcare administration need to have some regard for the system and not just rely on observations or experimental data. For instance, the policy statement issued by the board of directors to healthcare executives on implanting emergencies required more than the experience of unforeseen events to issue the policy (Healthcare Executives’ Role in Emergency Management, n.d.). It is not enough to give an approach based only on the observed emergency cases; more work should be done to ensure that all areas of concern have been researched and attended to appropriately. It also needed to consider how the system operates to ensure the policy could be integrated successfully.
Resource challenges refer to the inadequacy of expertise, time, and costs needed to integrate state policies into the healthcare systems efficiently. The policies must be issued with enough time to accommodate any potential challenge. Expert advice is also required to differentiate the health networks that work well with the policies (Raus, 2020). Additionally, these policies need to be accompanied by enough funding to ensure that these policies work. Most states issue policies without offering the required resources to implement these reforms. Sometimes the policies issued are feasible but become ineffective due to inadequate resources.
Although these challenges may cause the integration of policies to become ineffective in healthcare systems, there are several ways they can be remedied. One way is by developing a joint commission that would ensure the integrated policies serve the best interest of the patients through safe and quality care (Hasnain-Wynia, 2022). Also, involving the healthcare administrators during policy formulation and incorporating their suggestions will assist in identifying aspects that can make it more convenient.
The healthcare administrators understand the system, and their input can be invaluable to the whole operation. Further, hiring a team of experts to analyze and evaluate the whole procedure is another way to remedy these challenges. These experts could assist in ensuring the system would work in real life with few obstacles that can be managed. Integrating state policies into the healthcare system is a crucial process that requires vigilant and well-calculated strategies.
References
Hasnain-Wynia, Dr. (2022). Toward Health Equity and Patient-Centeredness: Integrating Health Literacy, Disparities Reduction, and Quality Improvement: Workshop Summary. National Library of Medicine. Web.
Healthcare Executives’ Role in Emergency Management. (n.d.). American College of Healthcare Executives. Web.
Raus, K. (2020). Challenges in turning a great idea into great health policy: the case of integrated care – BMC Health Services Research. BioMed Central. Web.