Lincoln Medical Center Strategic Plan Paper Example

Lincoln Medical Center is a certified referral facility which offers various healthcare services. Notably, the hospital is widely known for provision of community based innovative programs and addressing the specific needs of their clients. For instance, the firm offers treatment services for obesity, asthma, cancer, diabetes and tuberculosis. Furthermore, Lincoln Medical Center has more than 300 physicians who handle the inpatients and outpatients on daily basis. Also, the hospital is equipped with neonatal intensive, pediatric intensive, coronary care beds, and station renal dialysis unit. However, in the recent days, the hospital has faced a number of challenges jeopardizing its major operations, thus, compromising service delivery. For instance, Lincoln Medical Center has suffered from lack of transparency, too much unnecessary care, and poor accommodation of the patients, slow adoption of the information technology, work shortages and discontent, and inadequate mechanisms of addressing the consumerism against the clients. Nevertheless, the hospital devises different mechanisms of generating solutions to the persistence problems.

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The Challenges of the Lincoln Medical Center

Due to wide increase in the use of internet to acquire the healthcare information, the rate of consumerism has greatly improved (Kirsch, Levine, Fallon-Krueger & Jaros, 2011). For instance, a large numbers of families and patients are currently able to generate wider information regarding their healthcare requirements. As a consequence, they make their own decisions about diagnosis and treatment and advise the medical experts at the hospital about the exact services they require. Furthermore, the patients are capable of managing their own illness and diseases. In a survey conducted at Lincoln Medical Center, about 16 percent of patients testified that they had sought for their personal healthcare information through the internet. Similarly, a large number of the respondents argued that they would like their laboratory test to be available online. However, the Lincoln Medical Center is yet to establish a system that would encourage the free sharing of information between the patients and the physicians (Chen, 2015). Patients and caregivers have openly expressed their frustration towards the inability of the hospital to include a system which allows them to participate in decision making and obtain the decisions they need.

Despite the wide popularity of the hospital in different states in America, Lincoln Medical Center still faces the problem of undersupply of nurses and other healthcare professionals. The shortages of the healthcare workers are greatly attributed to poor management strategies. In recent survey, the hospital healthcare statistics indicated that they nurses shortages is on rise and if not urgently addressed, it can turn to a crisis (Vayena, Salathe, Madoff & Brownstein, 2015). According to senior manager at the department of Human Resource Management, if the trends of layoffs continue, the shortage of the nurses is likely to skyrocket to more than 30% by 2020. Furthermore, some of the nurses employed at the hospital are dissatisfied with their jobs and are planning to quit the assigned duties. In an interview conducted at the hospital, about 50% of the nurses below 30 years are not comfortable working at Lincoln Medical Center. Some of the reasons for the high level of dissatisfaction among healthcare professionals at the organization include increase in overtime, heavy workloads, low wages, and unavailability of sufficient support staffs (Vayena, Salathe, Madoff & Brownstein, 2015). The shortages of the nurses at the hospital led to provision of fragmented healthcare and reduced instances of one-on-one sharing of information between the healthcare professionals and the patients.

The slow adoption of the technology at the Lincoln Medical Center is a challenge affecting major operations at the hospital (Vayena, Salathe, Madoff & Brownstein, 2015). Nationally, the adoption of technology in different facilities is on the rise, thus, leading to great changes in the health system. The latest report which a team of auditors presented to the top management indicates that the automation of the clinical, administrative and financial operations is crucial in enhancing the consumer confidence, improving quality, reducing errors and improving efficiency (Chen, 2015). Furthermore, the report identified the key areas that can greatly improve with adoption of modern technology. In particular, the auditors argued that the technology can enhance the clinical decision making through the provision of real time data. Furthermore, Information Technology can increase communication between healthcare providers and patients located in remote areas with minimal accessibility (Vayena, Salathe, Madoff & Brownstein, 2015). As a matter of fact, health professionals use modern communication platform for collecting aggregate clinical data, promoting the remote medical consultation services and increasing patients access to reliable health information.

Despite the great contributions of the IT in promoting better service delivery in healthcare platform, Lincoln Medical Center has never made proportional investment in the Information Technology (Obama, 2016). Some of the clinical information is stored in poorly organized paper records making them difficult to retrieve. Furthermore, a few patients have email addresses to access their specific healthcare providers. Also, most of the payments to the facility are made over the counter on face-to-face visits, hence, the patients cannot benefit from the technology simple decision aid such as reminders systems. Lastly, the healthcare system at Lincoln Medical Center is still prone to unacceptable number of medical errors which negatively affects the quality of service delivery (Obama, 2016). Moreover, the errors occur due to insufficient information systems to check, process and store the clinical data in accordance to the required guidelines. In other words, the current system do not collect and store the right data and they are not linked to each other, thus, unable to permit easy communication between the key players in the healthcare system (Obama, 2016).

Fourth, the hospital system has some of the unnecessary care which increases the overall cost of operation. According to the recent audit report, the facility spend large amount of dollars in the overuse and the unnecessary care accounts (US Department of Health and Human Service, 2016). According to American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, early deliveries are unnecessary services offered at Lincoln Medical Center (McGinnis, Stuckhardt, Saunders & Smith, 2013). The national statistics shows high rate of increase in early deliveries in hospitals which result to complication for the mothers. As result, the capital spends in the services increase and the number of nurses assigned to the patients rises. Despite the campaign carried out by the health institutions such as Childbirth Connection, and Association of Women's Health, Obstetric & Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN), some health facilities such as Lincoln Medical Center still offer early delivery services. Experts rate the services as unnecessary because they are likely to lead to health complication and use of large amount of dollars (McDonald, 2014).

Furthermore, Lincoln Medical Center faces great challenge on issues of accountability and transparency. For instance, the management does not properly store the information regarding the life saving healthcare system. Furthermore, the facility does not keep adequate record for the capital spent on elective early delivery services. Notably, the governments agencies and the highly ranked medical societies have warned health institutions against the elective early deliveries services (McGinnis, Stuckhardt, Saunders & Smith, 2013). However, some facilities have ignored the government warnings and choose ti continue with the practice. Because the services of elective early delivery are highly expensive, Lincoln Health Center hides some of the financial information to conceal the loss they incur. Furthermore, the top management at the hospital department embezzles or diverts fund assigned to specific activities which aim at improving service delivery at the firm. Finally, the political factors as well affect the operation of healthcare services at the hospital (McDonald, 2014). For instance, the middle level managers are not selected base on merits, but instead, chosen based on political affiliations. Consequently, the managers end up serving the interests of their bosses rather than the welfare of the society.

Solutions to the Challenges

Lincoln Medical Center must devise the appropriate mechanisms of solving the problems which prevent their successful operations. For instance, the organization can adopt the complimentary alternative mechanisms to solve the ever rising rate of consumerism. For example, the firm can introduce over-the-counter services to improve the rate of healthcare delivery for the patients with personal diagnosis alternatives (McGinnis, Stuckhardt, Saunders & Smith). Furthermore, over-the-counter services can improve the interaction between healthcare professionals and the patients, thus, resulting in better outcomes. Also, the hospital can offer complimentary food products through health stores to improve the value of the services they offer. Conversely, the hospital can address shortages of health professional through by increasing the number of professionals in other disciplines (Shi & Singh, 2014). For instance, the management of the Lincoln Medical Center can hire the services of physician assistants, nurse practitioners, optometrists, certified nurse midwives, podiatrists, and nurse anesthetists.

Additionally, the firms can improve the working conditions for the nurses, thus, increasing work satisfaction. For instance, the management can hire more graduates from health institutions to curb the high rate of understaffing (Shi & Singh, 2014). To solve the problem of less skilled workers in the hospital, the management of Lincoln Medical Center can organize sponsorship programs which aim at equipping their current staffs with advance skills to offer better services. Furthermore, the firm can deploy the mechanism as a motivational means, thus, improving work satisfaction (Starr, 2013). Lastly, the hospital can improve the wages of the workers and reasonably pay for the overtime.

Solving technological challenges requires the firm to hire IT experts who can conduct proper analysis of the systems and suggest the best procedures of adopting the solutions. Moreover, the company can set aside substantial capital to improve the automation and computerization of the system (Starr, 2013). The capital investment must aim at improving the software, the hardware and the data entry systems, thus, resulting in easy retrieval of the information. The facility can establish the organization universal standard which can capture, store, process and present health information in an organized manner. Furthermore, the hospital can adopt and implement the government regulatory requirements stated in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (McCormick, & Pruthi, 2017). Notably, the regulatory requirement governs the email use by the patient and guarantees his or her privacy and confidentiality of the medical records.

The facility can adopt the job rotational techniques which affects the entire workforce regardless of the job group and personal status. The firm must continuously reshuffle nurses, subordinate staffs and top managers to improve service delivery and encourage uniformity (Jacobs & Skocpol, 201...