Healthcare is a complex and rapidly changing industry, with two forms of governance that preside over the leadership, planning, and management of healthcare facilities: the corporate section and the clinical section. Quality care is the top priority for most healthcare facilities worldwide, as it can achieve more profit, growth, efficiency, and consistent performance for the healthcare institution. In this report, we highlight the role of healthcare administrators in hospitals, who work to institute, lead, and create management protocols for a hospital.
Hospital networks are usually large, with various moving parts, and healthcare administrators’ role is to work closely with all departments and individuals to ensure the patient receives the best care possible. Health administrators’ decisions significantly impact the effectiveness of quality patient care and delivery; thus, the organization’s success depends heavily on their ability to lead, define, and prioritize organizational goals. Health administrators’ roles are defined into two categories- short and long term. In summary, the role of a health administrator within a hospital includes designing the budget, managing hiring, training Assessment of human resources, establishing hospital rates, procuring funding and critical partnership, developing organizational strategy, ensuring compliance with regulatory policies, developing hospital policies, and last but not least, streamlining financial and operations activities and practices. In the short term, health administrators are tasked with overseeing the day-to-day administrative operations and creating strategies to supervise medical services.
To ensure better patient care, hospitals need to engage in various activities, and departmentalization comes into focus, especially in defining the hospital decision-making structure. Each department (corporate and clinical) plays an important purpose critical to the organization; thus, there is a greater need for attention to be paid to their respective process units. Departments represent different process units or comprehensive unit-based process (CUP) teams. Departmentalization provides the hospital with several advantages such as the ability to follow the principles of occupational specialization, ease talent acquisition, training, hiring, and supervision of the general specialties within the hospital, provide administrators with a greater ability to maintain oversight into hospital functions and apply performance appraisal, and allow for logical reflection of functions as such maintain the organizational discipline of workers relative to their qualifications and levels of achievement. Hospitals have various processes that compel the need for management, which includes access to patient information and communication, patient tracking and registry, patient care and management, human resource processes, pay disbursement, test referral and tracking, external activity coordination (funding and establishing a strategic partnership with other essential authorities), and quality improvement management.
Hospitals are a dynamic working environment with a variety of departments all working towards a similar goal. There is a need to establish a strategic system in which all voices are heard, and no single voice undermines the other within the decision-making structures to ensure the minimization of conflict of interest. Communication can be manifested by adopting technological innovation, regularly scheduled training, good policies, all of which are aimed at harmonization and capacity building. Communication in hospitals is essential as it allows for care providers to protect patients (and the hospital from liability), improve day-to-day operations, create efficiency and harmony within the parallel teams, and ensure that any changes in health policies and regulations do not challenge managers and leaders in emphasizing the delivery of high and quality care to patients.
