Week 4 Discussion

Affordable Care Act

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Patient Protection is based on the significance to reduce healthcare care spending. In today’s healthcare system, the rapid rise in healthcare spending has become a threat to the future of the United States (Sanders et al. 2016). As an advanced practice nurse, I have the potential to lower the healthcare cost by assuming provider roles within the healthcare workforce to provide care services equal or better quality at lower costs than other care providers.

         Also, as an advanced practice nurse, I will strive to reduce medical errors by being in the frontline of medical care in the hospital and supply caretakers and clinicians with diagnostic information that is critical in preventing medical errors. I would advocate for implementation of healthcare informatics which will help to reduce medical errors and improve patient outcome. Healthcare informatics does not only give providers timely and accurate access to patient information, but it also reduces and prevents medical errors (Van Cott, 2018).

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         Misuse and overuse of services are problems that affect both cost and quality of care. It is estimated that about 30% of all healthcare spending in the U.S lead to no benefit to the patient and some even results in harm (Nassery et al. 2015). For instance, unexplained use of angioplasty, open heart surgery, and use intensity of healthcare care system cost approximately 600 billion dollars per year avoidable costs. Misuse of drugs and treatment is also estimated to cost 53 dollars, and overuse of antibiotics for respiratory conditions cost about 1.2 billion dollars (Nassery et al. 2015). These are just a few examples that plague all purchasers of healthcare including state employee benefit purchasers and Medicaid agencies. As an advanced practice nurse, I would make efforts to reduce misuse and overuse services by identifying opportunities to minimize misuse and overused services. For instance, I would encourage my organization to prioritize among a list of misused and overused services. I would also support the organization to consider criteria for prioritizing such as frequency and cost of the problem and relative risk to patient safety. This approach will help to create awareness of services which are likely to be overused or misused.  

References

1. Nassery, N., Segal, J. B., Chang, E., and Bridges, J. F. (2015). Systematic overuse of healthcare services: a conceptual model. Applied health economics and health policy, 13(1), 1-6.
2. Sanders, G. D., Neumann, P. J., Basu, A., Brock, D. W., Feeny, D., Krahn, M., ... and Salomon, J. A. (2016). Recommendations for conduct, methodological practices, and reporting of cost-effectiveness analyses: second panel on cost-effectiveness in health and medicine. Jama, 316(10), 1093-1103.
3. Van Cott, H. (2018). Human errors: Their causes and reduction. In Human error in medicine (pp. 53-65). CRC Press.