Optimizing Health Care Coalitions: Conceptual Frameworks and a Research Agenda

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 717-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Hupert ◽  
Karen Biala ◽  
Tara Holland ◽  
Avi Baehr ◽  
Aisha Hasan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Emergency Response ◽  
Disaster Preparedness ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
High Reliability ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
The Us ◽  
Hospital Preparedness

AbstractThe US health care system has maintained an objective of preparedness for natural or manmade catastrophic events as part of its larger charge to deliver health services for the American population. In 2002, support for hospital-based preparedness activities was bolstered by the creation of the National Bioterrorism Hospital Preparedness Program, now called the Hospital Preparedness Program, in the US Department of Health and Human Services. Since 2012, this program has promoted linking health care facilities into health care coalitions that build key preparedness and emergency response capabilities. Recognizing that well-functioning health care coalitions can have a positive impact on the health outcomes of the populations they serve, this article informs efforts to optimize health care coalition activity. We first review the landscape of health care coalitions in the United States. Then, using principles from supply chain management and high-reliability organization theory, we present 2 frameworks extending beyond the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response’s current guidance in a way that may help health care coalition leaders gain conceptual insight into how different enterprises achieve similar ends relevant to emergency response. We conclude with a proposed research agenda to advance understanding of how coalitions can contribute to the day-to-day functioning of health care systems and disaster preparedness. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness.2015;9:717–723)

From silos to coalitions: The evolution of the US Hospital Preparedness Program

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Medcalf, PhD ◽  
Shreya Roy, MS, PhD Student ◽  
Sarbinaz Bekmuratova, PhD ◽  
Wael ElRayes, MBBCh, PhD, FACHE ◽  
Harlan Sayles, MS ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Preparedness ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emergency Plans ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
The Us ◽  
Hospital Preparedness ◽  
Day To Day Operations ◽  
Hospital Emergency Preparedness ◽  
Percent Decrease

Objective: The objective of this article is to trace the hospital emergency preparedness movement in the United States, strengthen the case for hospital investments in emergency preparedness, and make recommendations to ensure sustainability of the program.  Design/Approach: This article is a narrative review. Main themes from the literature about the US Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP) are discussed, beginning with the trends in funding levels of the HPP, the rise of regional healthcare coalitions, preparedness performance measures, and the challenges faced over the past 15 years of HPP activities. Finally, recommendations are made about ways to sustain the program.Findings: The HPP was established in 2002 and funding for the program has seen a 56 percent decrease over the last 16 years. Beyond the initial investment in supplies and equipment, hospitals have received very little of the healthcare preparedness funding.Disaster drills and exercises to test emergency plans in hospitals are perceived as a costly distraction from daily work. The biggest challenge is the lack of engagement and support from hospital leadership.Conclusions: To ensure the sustainability of the HPP, the positive impact of preparedness activities on the hospital’s day-to-day operations must be demonstrated.

Transformation of the US Veterans Health Administration

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan B. Perlin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Veterans Health Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Veterans Affairs ◽  
United States Department ◽  
Veterans Health ◽  
Department Of Veterans Affairs ◽  
Health Administration ◽  
The Us

Ten years ago, it would have been hard to imagine the publication of an issue of a scholarly journal dedicated to applying lessons from the transformation of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs Health System to the renewal of other countries' national health systems. Yet, with the recent publication of a dedicated edition of the Canadian journal Healthcare Papers (2005), this actually happened. Veterans Affairs health care also has been similarly lauded this past year in the lay press, being described as ‘the best care anywhere’ in the Washington Monthly, and described as ‘top-notch healthcare’ in US News and World Report's annual health care issue enumerating the ‘Top 100 Hospitals’ in the United States (Longman, 2005; Gearon, 2005).

scholarly journals Characterizing the Rural Opioid Use Environment in Kentucky Using Google Earth: Virtual Audit

10.2196/14923 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. e14923 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Danielle Crawford ◽  
Regine Haardöerfer ◽  
Hannah Cooper ◽  
Izraelle McKinnon ◽  
Carla Jones-Harrell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Substance Use ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
Opioid Epidemic ◽  
Care Facilities

Background The opioid epidemic has ravaged rural communities in the United States. Despite extensive literature relating the physical environment to substance use in urban areas, little is known about the role of physical environment on the opioid epidemic in rural areas. Objective This study aimed to examine the reliability of Google Earth to collect data on the physical environment related to substance use in rural areas. Methods Systematic virtual audits were performed in 5 rural Kentucky counties using Google Earth between 2017 and 2018 to capture land use, health care facilities, entertainment venues, and businesses. In-person audits were performed for a subset of the census blocks. Results We captured 533 features, most of which were images taken before 2015 (71.8%, 383/533). Reliability between the virtual audits and the gold standard was high for health care facilities (>83%), entertainment venues (>95%), and businesses (>61%) but was poor for land use features (>18%). Reliability between the virtual audit and in-person audit was high for health care facilities (83%) and entertainment venues (62%) but was poor for land use (0%) and businesses (12.5%). Conclusions Poor reliability for land use features may reflect difficulty characterizing features that require judgment or natural changes in the environment that are not reflective of the Google Earth imagery because it was captured several years before the audit was performed. Virtual Google Earth audits were an efficient way to collect rich neighborhood data that are generally not available from other sources. However, these audits should use caution when the images in the observation area are dated.

Challenges of Designing and Implementing High Consequence Infectious Disease Response

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 563-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan M. King ◽  
Chetan Tiwari ◽  
Armin R. Mikler ◽  
Martin O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
Disease Response ◽  
Response Planning ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
State And Local

AbstractEbola is a high consequence infectious disease—a disease with the potential to cause outbreaks, epidemics, or pandemics with deadly possibilities, highly infectious, pathogenic, and virulent. Ebola’s first reported cases in the United States in September 2014 led to the development of preparedness capabilities for the mitigation of possible rapid outbreaks, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) providing guidelines to assist public health officials in infectious disease response planning. These guidelines include broad goals for state and local agencies and detailed information concerning the types of resources needed at health care facilities. However, the spatial configuration of populations and existing health care facilities is neglected. An incomplete understanding of the demand landscape may result in an inefficient and inequitable allocation of resources to populations. Hence, this paper examines challenges in implementing CDC’s guidance for Ebola preparedness and mitigation in the context of geospatial allocation of health resources and discusses possible strategies for addressing such challenges. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2018;12:563–566)

Emergency Preparedness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D Hurd ◽  
Stephenie Lukas ◽  
Ardis Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Management ◽  
Emergency Response ◽  
Emergency Preparedness ◽  
Disaster Preparedness ◽  
Community Pharmacists ◽  
Pharmacy Students ◽  
Rapid Responses ◽  
The Us ◽  
National Response

Pharmacists, and pharmacy students, normally have a limited exposure to the principles and structures of emergency management necessary to help coordinate effective and rapid responses. However, pharmacists’ work in disaster preparedness has taken many focuses. Community pharmacists develop emergency preparedness manuals, organize health-system pharmacy teams to respond to terrorism attacks, and identify essential actions for effective emergency response. This chapter focuses on the US health care system and emergency preparedness within its borders, starting with basic terminology and concepts and then moving onto the key components of U.S. National Response Frameworks and the role of pharmacists in the Frameworks and larger emergency preparedness and planning efforts.

America's health care dilemma: not a pretty sight

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-346
Author(s):  
DAVID WILSFORD
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Right

As the American right wing’s control of national (and local) politics implodes in the United States, there is the inevitable hope wafting in the air as policy specialists and other political activists on the other side of the divide anticipate capturing the US presidency at the end of 2008 to go with the center-left’s majorities won in the US Congress at the end of 2006. And so, health care reform is once again on the march! Alas, if Max Weber was wise to have observed that ideas run upon the tracks of interests, implying clearly that some good ideas die their death because they do not find the right track of interests, while some tracks of interests go nowhere for lack of the right idea, the health policy debate still provides a Technicolor demonstration that the mish and mash of this and that is not yet pointing the country in any particular direction, regardless of election outcomes in 2006 and 2008. Worse yet, in spite of the great sociologist Reinhard Bendix’s demonstration in his masterwork Kings orPeople (1978) that non-incremental transformations often occur at critical junctures of a nation’s history due to the diffusion effects of ideas from abroad, there is no evidence in the current (or past) American debate that the country has ever learned anything at all or thinks it has anything at all to learn from the way these problems are grappled with, and more successfully, elsewhere. (Oh, let’s just take Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, the UK, and a handful of other countries as quick examples.)

What Is the Affordable Care Act a Case of? Understanding the ACA through the Comparative Method

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-691
Author(s):  
Holly Jarman ◽  
Scott L. Greer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Affordable Care Act ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract International comparisons of US health care are common but mostly focus on comparing its performance to peers or asking why the United States remains so far from universal coverage. Here the authors ask how other comparative research could shed light on the unusual politics and structure of US health care and how the US experience could bring more to international conversations about health care and the welfare state. After introducing the concept of casing—asking what the Affordable Care Act (ACA) might be a case of—the authors discuss different “casings” of the ACA: complex legislation, path dependency, demos-constraining institutions, deep social cleavages, segmentalism, or the persistence of the welfare state. Each of these pictures of the ACA has strong support in the US-focused literature. Each also cases the ACA as part of a different experience shared with other countries, with different implications for how to analyze it and what we can learn from it. The final section discusses the implications for selecting cases that might shed light on the US experience and that make the United States look less exceptional and more tractable as an object of research.

scholarly journals Public Reporting: Illumination or Shadows?

2006 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-98
Author(s):  
LE Nicolle
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Infection Control ◽  
Health Care Organizations ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Reporting ◽  
Mandatory Reporting ◽  
Infection Rates ◽  
The Us ◽  
Conceptual Shift

The infection control communities in Britain and the United States (US) are experiencing an extraordinary conceptual shift with legislated mandatory reporting of hospital infections. In Britain, this shift began in 2001 with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteremia episodes (1), which are reported to the National Health Service and are publically available on a Health Protection Agency Web site. In the US, the impetus for public reporting of infection rates has come from consumer groups (2). These organizations have bypassed health care organizations and public health and other practitioners, and have addressed their demands to state legislatures. At least eight states have now passed and several more are considering legislation to mandate reporting. The process has been rancorous and, at least initially, vigorously opposed by health care organizations and infection control practitioners.

Challenge of Hospital Emergency Preparedness: Analysis and Recommendations

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (S1) ◽  
pp. S74-S82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Barbera ◽  
Dale J. Yeatts ◽  
Anthony G. Macintyre
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Emergency Response ◽  
Emergency Preparedness ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Health Care ◽  
Medical Emergency

ABSTRACTIn the United States, recent large-scale emergencies and disasters display some element of organized medical emergency response, and hospitals have played prominent roles in many of these incidents. These and other well-publicized incidents have captured the attention of government authorities, regulators, and the public. Health care has assumed a more prominent role as an integral component of any community emergency response. This has resulted in increased funding for hospital preparedness, along with a plethora of new preparedness guidance.Methods to objectively measure the results of these initiatives are only now being developed. It is clear that hospital readiness remains uneven across the United States. Without significant disaster experience, many hospitals remain unprepared for natural disasters. They may be even less ready to accept and care for patient surge from chemical or biological attacks, conventional or nuclear explosive detonations, unusual natural disasters, or novel infectious disease outbreaks.This article explores potential reasons for inconsistent emergency preparedness across the hospital industry. It identifies and discusses potential motivational factors that encourage effective emergency management and the obstacles that may impede it. Strategies are proposed to promote consistent, reproducible, and objectively measured preparedness across the US health care industry. The article also identifies issues requiring research. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2009;3(Suppl 1):S74–S82)

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