Service Line Development
Task 3
A.Identify current national healthcare trends and policy initiatives that may affect the healthcare organization evident in the attached “Service Line Development Case Study.”
Trinity Community Hospital is going through changes just like any other facility. Looking at different areas of the hospital, healthcare is changing everywhere. It is changing in the machines being used, patient rooms, and even the billing end of the hospital.
Patients need to have the primary precedence over the pharmaceuticals and insurance companies. Many patients feel like they do not receive the best care they could receive with their physicians because they feel that their physicians have to abide by too many rules and regulations.
Some of the major concerns of the Oncology Center are that they have staffing concerns, competition of other facilities, and being unaffordable to patients.
The Tertiary Medical Center and the Regional Hospital have cancer services but do not run very organized facilities. They both do not have educational programs nor ACOS accreditation. Hospitals seem to keep running and survive compared to private practices. Trinity Community Hospital should try to get ACOS accredited and provide educational programs to patients which will make them more superior compared to the Tertiary Medical Center and the Regional Hospital.
Medication amounts are still an issue for patients since they are still very costly even after insurance and Medicare Legislation is not assisting the patients very much either. Their out-of-pocket expenses are too costly for their oncology oral medications. There were discounts that were supposed to be passed on to the patients but the facilities did not (Wang, Tao & Hamilton, n.d.). The companies that were producing the oncology medications were also supposed to give the facilities a good sized discount but they did not help the hospitals. There are a lot of the patients that have cancer...