Healthcare Change Initiative Resistors
Within the health care sector, various forces have hindered the adoption of change initiatives. Funding serves as the major issue hindering adoption of a change in care institutions. For example, two financial challenges emerge when incorporating innovation in the health care setting. The process of financing the development of innovation and identifying the parties that would pay for the services or products is a challenging issue. Most of the financing initiatives take a considerable amount of time, such as the duration needed to approve new therapies or drugs by the FDA (AFSCME, 2017). Venture capitalists are supporting IT startups since they deem them as capable of getting their money in a period of between two and three years. In the case of biotech investors, they might wait for over ten years before knowing whether the product they introduced was approved for use. A different issue revolves around where traditional capital sources are not accustomed to the health care sector. In this sense, challenges emerge when it comes to finding investors who are capable of offering guidance to innovators (Brook, 2017).
Regulations by the government also pose challenges in the health care sector. Even though public policy can assist in change initiatives, it also hinders them. For instance, the recent legislation across the U.S. instituted a suspension concerning establishing new specialty hospitals that target particular surgical procedures (Herzlinger, 2006). Therefore, it is essential for health care institutions to understand that broader regulation networks can affect their change initiatives based on the ways in which the rules are modified, enacted, or applied. Officials agree that politicians or the public would punish them for under-regulating, as opposed to tightening the process of approval, irrespective of whether doing so leads to delayed change processes (Austin, at al., 2016). Organizations that introduce new ideas also need to realize that regulators might interpret ambiguous rules tightly, hence hindering their focus on innovation.
Technology is also a major force that is hindering change initiatives in health care institutions. With the evolution of medical technology, it is essential to understand how to invest or adopt it. In case medical facilities move too fast, the infrastructure they require to support innovation might not be in place yet. If they wait too long, the time they needed to realize competitive advantage might have passed. Therefore, health care institutions are forced to deal with the rivalry that prevails within each technology as well as in distinct techniques. Hence, technology also poses challenges on implementing ideal change initiatives within health care settings (AFSCME, 2017).
The increasing engagement and empowerment of customers in the healthcare setting presents challenges on change adoption in care facilities. For instance, sick individuals, as well as their families, join institutions, including American Cancer Society, which lobbies for research finances. Moreover, interest groups, especially the elderly seek increased funding to cater for health care needs via recognized institutions, such as AARP. The individuals suffering from different illnesses impose pressure on care providers to access diagnostics, drugs, devices, and services they perceive as effective (AFSCME, 2017). Here, medical institutions encounter a challenge in instituting changes that can deal with such populations.
Also, patients spend considerable amounts of their finances on health care. For example, they spend around $40 billion on medications, such as acupuncture, which are perceived as complementary (AFSCME, 2017). Most traditional medical practitioners understand the medications as being of doubtful value. With the information that the customers gather from the Internet, they end up disagreeing with the medical advice they perceive as misleading. They might end up discarding drugs that their doctors prescribe. Any firm that leverages or recognizes the growing empowerment sense among consumers might end up boosting change innovation. However, most of the present institutions do not accept the growing cases of consumer empowerment. These hinder them from adopting change initiatives that would rhyme with the preferences and needs of their customers concerning health care (Suchman et al., 2011).
Action Plans: Eradicating Resistance to Change
For medical institutions to facilitate change adoption, they can follow several strategies. Exercising focus toward customers is a major way of overcoming change resistance in the health care sector. Through embarking on innovations, medical institutions would manage to offer services in more efficient, convenient, and cheaper ways. Healthcare customers today are increasingly empowered and time-stressed. Health care systems need to introduce health plans that involve their clients during the process of delivering care. In this sense, customers gain increased control toward their spending on personal care. A health plan can also lay emphasis on user-friendliness since patients are just like other consumers. They anticipate receiving good products and services as well as ease of use (Herzlinger, 2006). As such, institutions should introduce measures that have the capacity of reducing wait times. Such practices would prevent patients from shifting between health care facilities in search of treatment.
Effective adoption of technology would also play a vital role in addressing the issue of change resistance in the health care sector. New diagnostic methods, drugs, medical devices, and systems for delivering drugs provide patients with hope for improved treatment. Care also becomes less disruptive, costly, and painful (Arbuckle, 2012). For instance, the introduction of implanted sensors would assist patients in monitoring their illnesses in a more efficient manner. Investing in IT would also facilitate in connecting diverse information sources in the health care sector hence boost quality and reduce costs significantly. They can keep different providers informed concerning the condition of the patient, thus reduce omission errors. These kinds of initiatives would assist in boosting change initiatives within the health care industry considerably (Arbuckle, 2012).
Additionally, since the health care sector is still highly fragmented, organizations should focus on instituting business models that would allow them to cope with the diverse needs of patients as they arise. By instituting innovative business models, especially the ones that merge health care organizations would manage to boost efficiency, improve care, and save patients time (Brook, 2017). They can introduce several free players to serve a single institution thus create economies of scale. They can also consider bringing chronic disease treatment under one roof to make treatment more convenient and useful. Concerning the latter case, the patients attain a one-stop shopping thereby freeing the burden of having to coordinate care with various providers. These moves would encourage medical institutions to become more active and embrace the change processes (Institute of Medicine, 2011).
