Veterans Health Administration
The case presented in Module 3 is another real-world situation using advancements in technology to improve health care and IT governance. The Veterans Health Administration case study highlights critical factors to the VHA's success by discussing technology infrastructure, organizational culture, and managerial leadership. The student will analyze the case in six sections in the order followed. Also, these sections must be used to format level 1 heading titles in the case report.
- Give the case background and organizational environment.
- Describe the case situation and structure of the organization.
- Identify the key problems and issues in the case.
- Describe how the organization responded to those issues with technology and leadership in terms of successes, failures, or unforeseen results.
- Provide an assessment and reasons for supporting those solutions.
- Review the case finding and conclude how the solution could be improved or propose something different.
This case was available free to read and download from the Palgrave McMillan Journal of Information Technology site. Cases for free change every week, but the journal offers this disclosure “Palgrave Macmillan and the editorial team have selected this set of papers from the archive of the journal to give a representative sample of the best of our content. These papers, listed in chronological order, are available free to read and download.” The case is included in this page for easy access.
Broderick A. (2013, January). The Veterans Health Administration: Taking home Telehealth services to scale nationally. The Commonwealth Fund. Retrieved from http://www(dot)commonwealthfund(dot)org/~/media/Files/Publications/Case%20Study/2013/Jan/1657_Broderick_telehealth_adoption_VHA_case_study.pdf
Assignment Expectations (50 points total)
Length: Minimum 3–5 pages excluding cover page and references (since a page is about 300 words, this is approximately 900–1,500 words).
Assignment-driven criteria (25 points): Demonstrates clear understanding of the subject and addresses all key elements of the assignment.
Critical thinking (10 points): Demonstrates mastery conceptualizing the problem. Shows analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of required material.
Scholarly writing (5 points): Demonstrates writing proficiency at the academic level of the course; addresses the Learning Outcomes of the assignment.
Quality of references (4 points) and assignment organization (3 points): Uses relevant and credible sources to support assertions. Assignment is well organized and follows the structure of a well-written paper.
Citing sources (3 points): Uses in-text citations and properly formats references in APA style.
Veterans Health Administration
Name:
Institution:
Give the case background and organizational environment
The Veteran Health Administration (VHA) is one of the health care delivery organizations that are run under the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is an integrated system that is organized around service care instead of hospitals. The shared system of care is operated on the basis of accountability in clinical care, budgetary, planning and operations decisions that are collective. Since the initiation in the 1990s, it is a system that has proved very reliable, modern, effective, efficient, and very responsive. At the heart of the success of the system is the integration of the health care provision with information technology. This ensures that the organizations offer the veterans coordinated, high quality and very comprehensive care (Broderick, 2013).
Within the VHA there are the Office of Telehealth services (OTS) that offer a specialized program referred to as the Care Coordination Home Telehealth (CCHT). This is a program where the patient can access health care from their homes. Through the connectivity of audio visual electronic system that can be found installed in the homes of the veterans, the veterans and the health care providers at the centers can interact and provide specialized care. This reduces the cost of health care especially wit the terminal illness (Va.gov, 2014). The patients can be treated in the comfort of their homes, reducing the time they would be bed ridden at the hospital and reducing pressure on resources at the hospital. Some of the common conditions that are treated at the VHA facilities include diabetes, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, congestive heart failure among other conditions on veterans (Broderick, 2013).
Describe the case situation and structure of the organization
Currently the VHAs are the most successful health care facility programs in the country and most of the health care facilities would want to emulate the rate of success. The VHAs are still under the control of the department of veterans affairs. It is financed through the public budget. This budget finances the 21 VHAs that are on the integrated system with more than $50 billion US dollars annually. This money helps to take care of the veterans in the country that need help, all of whom are estimated to around 6 million. Unlike most of the health care systems, the VHAs are directly answerable to the congress (Broderick, 2013).
One of the aspects that have made the program a great success is the leadership and the structure of the organizations. There are central office officials, regional managers and some key personnel at the local levels (Va.gov, 2014). Decisions are run through the entire personnel chain of command this ensures thorough and precise decisions. This brings about the core element of the organization which relate to services that are patient centered, quality care, team based and inter disciplinary health care delivery.
Identify the key problems and issues in the case.
One of the main issues that the VHAs face is that they are not as many. This means that the do not cover all the areas of the nations and thus some of the veterans cannot benefit from the health care services and case management. Some of the veterans are forced to come from distant places to book places in the facilities and thus have to be admitted. As would be expected with any program that is fundamentally different, some of the clinicians find it hard to go with the program having been trained under different protocols (Broderick, 2013). It is also apparent that some of the VHAs run on primary c...