Healthcare organizations require to continuously improve their performances as a way of responding to the growing needs of the customers. The effectiveness of the processes is necessary to ensure that costs are minimized while quality is enhanced. To achieve this, the performance and productivity of the employees are necessary. Setting performance measures and monitoring the performance of the organization over time presents an opportunity for improvement. The healthcare managers must, therefore, set the organization goals, identify best practices, and align the processes with these objectives. Continuous monitoring ensures that areas of weaknesses, as measured by key performance indicators, are identified, and corrective measures observed.
Performance Measurement
Developing a performance measurement benchmark acts as an organizational tool to help drive continuous improvements using best practices. As the HIM of the Gateway healthcare systems, the first step to improving the productivity of the employees is to set the target based on the most critical factors of the organization. The target can be around customer satisfaction, the efficiency of the processes, and cost minimization. Once targets are set, the next process is the identification of best practices that can be best for benchmarking with the strategic goals ( Awadallah & Allam, 2015 ). The best practices act as a guide on the expected performance of the employees. The performance measure is required to determine how employees are performing against the set standards. Any recorded gap between the actual and expected performance is identified, and training needs to be designed to bridge the gap. A balanced scorecard is necessary to assess the programs of the organization in multiple areas, including patients, processes, and finance. This model will allow the employees to see their contribution against the set standards and see the need for improvement.
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Employment Laws
The employment laws such as non-discriminatory regulations, equal pay act, and age discrimination in employment act all have an impact on the evaluation of the employees' performance. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission prohibits employers from discriminating against the employees based on gender, race, nationality, or religion. As a result, the management must ensure that while conducting performance evaluation, they evaluate the performance and not characteristics ( Javidmehr & Ebrahimpour, 2015 ). There should be no preferential treatment during a performance evaluation, as this would amount to discrimination in the workplace. Similarly, age discrimination in employment is a law that prevents bias and discrimination based on age. The performance evaluation should strictly focus on performance and not other preferential characteristics.
Feedback
The standard for effective feedback is to provide constructive that helps the employees improve on their performance. The feedback needs to be clear, specific, and detailed to allow the employees to understand their strengths and weaknesses. When providing employees with feedback on their performance, it is important to be positive and not adopt criticism for the employees with poor performance. Provide constructive feedback through clear and specific communication, and take the necessary measures to improve the performance. Criticism is more likely to demotivate the employee, but constructive feedback creates a positive environment for improvement. Transparency is also necessary to make feedback effective.
Accreditation Standards
It is a recommendation that the organization implements performance management systems that will monitor and provide information on the performance of the staff. This approach ensures compliance with the leadership standard on the quality improvement and development of the performance management system. The second recommendation is to set regular feedback communication to the staff to keep them up to date with their performance and the need to improve ( Murray, 2015 ). The leadership should ensure that the feedback on the employee evaluation is provided regularly and to promote transparency with the staff. Building trust during performance evaluation ensures that the employees trust the process.
Stakeholders
Stakeholder diversity brings together multiple stakeholders with different interests and backgrounds in decision making. To address the compliance issues faced by Gateway health systems, the group of stakeholders should include the customers, employees, government, suppliers, and the communities. This diversified group of stakeholders has different interests and backgrounds, which can provide quality decisions on how best to solve the issues facing the organization. The quality of the decision increases when the stakeholder interest diversity is expressed through extensive sharing of the information. The government would present legal issues, and customers will focus on quality, employees on better working conditions and pay. When all these conflicting ideas are on the negotiation table, the parties make quality decisions.
Policy and Procedures
One of the new policies and procedures to address compliance issues faced by the organization is to prohibit the healthcare staff from sharing the medical information of the patients with unauthorized persons. One of the major issues faced by the organization is that most staff workers do not comply with the privacy rule of the employees. This act violates the HIPAA rule, which requires the protection of the private information of the patients. Prohibiting the staff from sharing of patients' information will thus enhance compliance with HIPAA. The other new policy to promote compliance is to prohibit discrimination of employees based on gender, age, ethnicity, or any other preferential characteristics. This policy would ensure that there is compliance with the anti-discriminatory laws.
Cultural Diversity
The new employees training areas to increase cultural awareness and respect the different cultural beliefs and values of others. Training employees to respect the values and cultural beliefs of others can help promote cultural awareness. Training the employees to be accommodative to workers of different backgrounds is essential in promoting cultural diversity in the workplace. The other training area can focus on communication skills in a diversified workplace. Training employees on cross-cultural communication can help promote workforce diversity ( Schouler-Ocak et al., 2015 ). There is a need for workers from different cultural backgrounds to communicate well with each other. Effective communication, together with cultural awareness, has been identified as an effective way to enhance cultural diversity in the workplace. The management can, therefore, focus on training employees on cultural awareness and cross-cultural communication.
Compliance Issues
The existing staff needs training on the HIPAA rules regarding the privacy of the patients' information. The existing employees require training so that they are aware of the privacy rules about the patients' information. This training will promote compliance with the HIPAA policy and privacy policy of the patients. The other specific training needs is to educate employees on the anti-discriminatory laws. The employees should be aware that discriminating against other employees is illegal and can result in serious legal actions.
Conclusion
Employees play a crucial role in the success of any healthcare organization. Employees are required to have quality training to enhance their skills and ability to increase patients satisfaction. At the same time, employees must comply with the regulations set by the healthcare department on patient's privacy and anti-discrimination. Adequate training of the employees can help boost their skills in cultural awareness and regulatory requirements.
References
Awadallah, E. A., & Allam, A. (2015). A critique of the balanced scorecard as a performance measurement tool. International Journal of Business and Social Science , 6 (7), 91-99.
Javidmehr, M., & Ebrahimpour, M. (2015). Performance appraisal bias and errors: The influences and consequences. International Journal of Organizational Leadership , 4 , 286-302.
Murray, K. (2015). Leadership Q&A. Nursing Management , 46 (7), 56.
Schouler-Ocak, M., Graef-Calliess, I. T., Tarricone, I., Qureshi, A., Kastrup, M. C., & Bhugra, D. (2015). EPA guidance on cultural competence training. European Psychiatry , 30 (3), 431-440.
