Emergency Response Plan for Business Continuity During Unexpected Operations
Instructions
COVID-19 of 2020 brought unprecedented disruption to healthcare operations and required healthcare leaders to revise, revamp, and reconsider how healthcare is delivered to the patient while sustaining operations and revenue generation.
In this scenario, you are the administrator of an ambulatory facility and report to the five primary care physicians who are the shareholders/owners. In addition to these five providers, other staff members include 1 mid-level provider (nurse practitioner), and 15 staff members including 2 RN supervisors, 3 LVNs who support clinical operations, 2 medical assistants in the lab and radiology, 3 HIM staff, 1 tech support, and 4 receptionists.
On the health information side, there is an EMR (an electronic medical record) with communications capabilities between providers and staff, business functions including practice management, lab, and radiology reporting, population health, human resources, and executive management reporting functions.
You have been tasked to develop an emergency response plan for the organization by the 5 shareholders/owners. Their primary concern is business continuity during unexpected operations; specifically, operations to protect staff and patients, the need to increase telecommunications, maintain expenses and revenue, maintain clinical care and patient engagement as much as practical, and safeguard the EMR and its content.
The following should be included in your proposal and used as primary APA headings/titles in your plan:
Identify, by position, and explain who is the organization's primary and secondary emergency response leaders while developing an emergency response team from the organizational makeup described. Please justify your selection of positions with an overview of the responsibilities.
Using the THIRA Process outlined in the Wagner textbook and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, elaborate on each step related to the COVID-19 pandemic response of this healthcare organization.
Using the operational and business responsibilities under each this week's lessons (4.1 and 4.2), explain how each one would be maintained in this emergency response plan.
Explain external guidance that would be used to establish an emergency plan.
Emergency Response Plan
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The coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) was a wake-up call for businesses and healthcare organizations. The healthcare industry, which was among the most affected, suffered major challenges, for instance, an increased number of admissions, which put a strain on the healthcare resources that the facilities had. Some depleted resources include essential personal protective equipment (PPEs) such as masks and medical supplies and increased staff shortages due to increased turnover rates. At the same time, other healthcare workers also succumbed to the illness. This highlights the need for a comprehensive emergency response plan to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. As the administrator of an ambulatory facility, I will develop an emergency response plan whose primary concern is business continuity during unexpected operations, and more specifically, operations that will protect the business in its entirety, including the staff and patients, maintain expenses, revenue, clinical care and safeguard electronic medical records (EMR) among others.
Identify, by position, and explain who is the organization's primary and secondary emergency response leaders while developing an emergency response team from the organizational makeup described. Please justify your selection of positions with an overview of the responsibilities.
According to Yale University (2023), everyone is responsible for creating a business continuity plan. This is to state that everyone in the organization has a role to play in emergency planning; however, there is a difference in the level of engagement in creating the plan. There should be leaders who oversee the program's planning and implementation, while others support the leaders. This is where primary and secondary emergency response leaders come in. The primary response leaders are responsible for the organization's overall response to the plan, while the secondary leaders support the primary leaders.
The primary leader is the healthcare organization administrator. A hospital administrator is usually responsible for overseeing activities in the entire organization. Therefore, the person is suitable to be the primary leader because he understands the needs and activities of every department and knows their roles and responsibilities. In the emergency plan, the administrator will be responsible for coordinating with other external organizations, such as public health agencies, to helping in creating an improved response. The administrator will also be responsible for communication on the response effort.
In order to select secondary leaders, it is crucial to understand the organization's essential functions because when the vital parts are disrupted, it can affect the organization's core mission, leading to a decline in returns (Yale University, 2023). The critical functions help to answer the question, "What is the minimum level of service the business has to offer to be still considered a business." Therefore, with this criterion, the following will be the secondary leaders. The first secondary leader is the Nurse Practitioner. In this respect, the nursing scope is one of the essential components of the ambulatory service. Therefore, the nurse practitioner will aid the administrator by guiding the RN nurses in their daily activities. They can also support other nursing practices, such as triaging and managing all other clinical operations.
Secondly, the emergency response team should include one health information management (HIM) staff. Electronic health records (EHR) remain among the most critical infrastructure in the health scope, as it helps to securely document, store and analyze health data (Health IT Playbook, 2019). Nearly four in every five office-based physicians and 96% of the non-federal acute care facilities in the United States utilize certified EHR architecture, making it an essential function (Diaz, 2023). The EMR also helps increase efficiency in hospitals through online booking of appointments. The HIM staff will ensure that all health information staff are committed to providing efficient operations in their unit. This is also emphasized by Heath (2019), who states that financial losses could be recorded when the informatics part of the hospital is not effectively functioning.
The receptionist is also a secondary staff who wi...