In the video How Doctors Can Help Low-Income Patients, the author touches on an important public health issue. He mentions statistics that most people who receive Medical Aid do not have the opportunity to become hospital clients. This is because many doctors and organizations refuse to work with low-income people. The main reasons for this are organizational difficulties since these patients often do not arrive on time, have documentation problems, and often do not speak English. Consequently, large numbers of U.S. residents do not receive proper medical care because they are considered to be difficult patients.
The speaker says that he was able to find a solution to this problem by setting up a special medical facility. The latter works exclusively with low-income patients with the Medical Aid program. The team of specialists was able to organize a system of work in which the behavior and life of the clients become an advantage of the organization of treatment (Parmar, 2019). The author says he was able to analyze the main factors affecting the hospital’s work with low-income populations and to adjust the organizational mechanisms to those aspects.
Consequently, this step allowed the manager to reduce costs, which would have been necessary to work with the population provided but are canceled when interacting with the target audience of the institution. For example, specialists abandoned phone calls and pre-registration due to the fact that people from low-income families do not have the opportunity to lead their lives punctually. The patient receives medical care within the next 15 minutes of arriving at the center, which saves a lot of money in setting up an appointment base (Parmar, 2019). In order not to send patients to the pharmacy for prescribed medications, doctors dispense the most necessary medications during admission.
Thus, the system of the organization was so attractive to low-income groups that the company began to have a large increase in customers and came to a high return on investment. An important advantage was the fact that the only insurance organization with which managers have the opportunity to cooperate is Medical Aid. Competitors usually have several partners, which creates organizational and financial difficulties and leads to losses. This speech demonstrates that there are no unsolvable problems within health care. The main task of a good manager interested in solving public health issues is to turn patients’ difficulties into advantages and to adapt organizational processes to them.
Reference
Parmar, P. J. (2019). How doctors can help low-income patients (and still make a profit). Www.ted.com. Web.