Ethical and Legal Concepts to Ensure High Quality Healthcare

Ethical and Legal Concepts to Ensure High Quality Healthcare

Sherry Heide

HCA 340 Managing in Health and Human Services

Instructor: Wanda Carter

13 June 2011

Ethical and Legal Concepts to Ensure High Quality Healthcare

All organizations should have room to improve the quality of healthcare services to ensure patient safety. Healthcare is a highly competitive market environment and healthcare providers are forced to improve their service quality due to the ever increasing expectations of their customers (Yesilada, 2009). This paper will investigate the term “healthcare organization” (HCO) and the role they play in delivering quality patient care and their role in improving the quality of the care they deliver based on patient satisfaction. This paper will also examine both the ethical concepts as well as the legal concepts that drive improvements in today’s healthcare market. This paper will analyze and discuss findings on what regulations have been set forth to ensure the delivery of high quality healthcare that protects patient safety. And lastly, it will analyze a research paper to show what has been tried in the past and the conclusion of that trial.

The term   “healthcare organization’ (HCO) applies to a wide range of organizations, including hospitals, provider organizations such as Preferred Provider Organization(PPO’s) and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO’s), physicians group practices, visiting nurse association’s, nursing homes and home care agencies, as well as organizations that support the infrastructure wherein health care is delivered (Agich, 2007). Although HCO’s have a variety of different structures, operational processes, business models and agendas, they share a common thread that ethically differentiate them from other social entities. In the healthcare arena persons involved in the delivery of quality care can expect to have ethical concepts to follow. With the dynamic work on becoming ethically sound to match their...