Implementing Policy in the Health Care Delivery System

In this LearnScape, the student is the Director of Quality Improvement for Bright Road Health Care System. The students team is in the process of establishing policies and procedures to ensure health law compliance. The student must work with team members to create policies and procedures that address the requirements, determine who the changes impact the most, and work with those people to develop a comprehensive communication strategy.

When new healthcare laws are passes this results in the new regulations. It is the responsibility of healthcare leaders to ensure that their in-house policies are in alignment with the regulations. Sometimes this only requires minor revisions to existing policies and slight adjustments to internal procedures. Other times, the regulations require a major overhaul or the creation of entirely new policies and procedures to ensure compliance with the laws. This scenario accurately demonstrates the processes that take place with new regulations are imposed on healthcare entities. A common problem within industry, including healthcare is the phenomenon referred to as asymmetric information or knowledge. This is a situation in which one party to a transaction has better information about it than another. The intent of implementing policies and procedures at the organizational level is to ensure that impacted stakeholders are keenly aware of the performance expectations associated with the new regulations at the institutional level. As you can see, the development and implementation of local policies and procedures will serve to minimize asymmetric knowledge and subsequently diminish opportunistic behaviors by those who are better informed. You probably have noticed that the government is frequently offering financial incentives to providers and provider organizations to implement institutional level policies and procedures that align with regulatory initiatives and requirements. For example, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, made available financial incentives to those providers who voluntarily agreed to purchase a certified electronic health record system, and then the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), following the passage of the Hitech Act of 2009, made available a reimbursement incentive for those providers who agreed to participate in meaningful use incentive program. There are also instances whereby organizations provide incentives to personnel in order to promote new programs or overcome concerns regarding the implementation of new policies and procedures.

Directions
Initial Posting

Students are to complete the LearnScape for Health Policy: Episode 3: Implementing Policy in the Health Care Delivery System (Scenario). Based on the information provided in the scenario and an outside review of the relevant literature, the student, functioning as the Director of Quality Improvement, for Bright Road Health Care System, will prepare a written recommendation that includes policy points that will serve as the basis for a new system policy that will address the provisions within the new healthcare law. The recommendation needs to be well-supported, logically presented, and thoroughly vetted.
This analysis should be prepared as a Microsoft Word document, and then attached to the unit discussion thread. There is no minimum or maximum in terms of the word count; however, the response should explicitly address all required components of this discussion assignment. The document should be prepared consistent with the APA writing style (6th edition) and reflect higher level cognitive processing (analysis, synthesis, and or evaluation). 
Use the Discussion Template to write out the paper and also use 3 references