How Quality Measures and Pay for Performance Affect Patient Outcomes

How Quality Measures and Pay for Performance Affect Patient Outcomes

Pay for performance is a reward system that rewards practitioners financially for their performance based on certain criteria in medical practice. It is a performance-based compensation approach that aims to improve the quality and delivery of healthcare services to patients. As such, this model also punishes the practitioners for achieving poor results. For instance, a psychologist whose patient fails to quit smoking at the end of their sessions does not receive the financial rewards associated with her role. In some ways, this model improves patient outcomes because it motivates the physicians and nurses to offer high quality services to their patients to ensure that they receive the financial rewards associated with their roles and criteria used for performance analysis. However, there is a risk to poor patient outcomes associated with this reward system, where it encourages patient dumping. This concept means that those patients with more complicated healthcare issues that have high risks tend to be relegated to the periphery, because the physicians prefer to focus on cases that are likely to be successful, so that they receive their rewards and bonuses (Kyeremateng et al., 2019). This practice leads to negative patient outcomes because those in the periphery suffer from lack of sufficient and timely medical attention.

A nurse who finds him/herself in such situations should consider applying ethical principles such as non-maleficence, which means to cause least harm. By applying this principle, the nurse would encourage the physicians to admit and attend to patients with complex medical issues. Additionally, the nurse should remind the rest of the practitioners about the Hippocratic Oath, which binds them to the duty to save lives. Patient dumping is a severe violation of this oath and the nurses’ responsibility should be to remind the colleagues about these ethical applications.

Professional Nursing Leadership and Management Roles

An emerging nursing leadership role that addresses emerging trends would be knowledge on nursing informatics and the use of technology in nursing (Harris et al., 2019). An emerging trend in healthcare is the use of technology in the practices, which are increasingly requiring nurses to learn and equip themselves with skills in technology. For instance, there are surgical robots used in surgery, and surgical nurses should be conversant with the machines, so that their role in the surgical room is fulfilling. Another example is the use of bedside alert systems which notify the practitioners when a patient leaves their bed unattended, hence, reducing the incidence of patient falls. Therefore, the nurse leaders are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that the nursing teams are technologically savvy as part of their nursing roles. The nurse leader and manager will ensure the availability of trainings in technology to enhance the nursing team’s professionalism. By doing so, the nurses promote patient health and safety. For instance, the bedside alert systems reduce the incidence of patient falls, and learning how to manage the electronic health records promotes patient health and enhances their professionalism levels since they comply with the HIPAA rules.

Emerging Trends

            An emerging trend in healthcare is the use of medical robots in operations such as surgeries. This practice requires that the medical practitioners learn how to operate the robots in the event the surgeon is unable to continue operating because of an emergency. The nurse also needs to learn how to setup the machine and recognize situations in which the machine malfunctions. Therefore, given this change, the nurses’ roles will change to include technological operations in the healthcare setting. The nurses will be tasked with the responsibility of learning how technological devices work in a hospital because in some emergency situations, the nurse may save a life.

Another emerging trend in healthcare is the application of telemedicine. Telemedicine is on the rise, given the technological advent in today’s era. Incorporating telemedicine practices in nursing will transform their roles. Telemedicine will enhance the role of the nurse as a communicator because the nurse should be reachable to their client upon request, through the telehealth systems. Since the interaction with the patient is no longer in person, the nurse should enhance their role as a communicator by using clear language, providing timely communication to their patient, and communicating within the shortest time possible, to allow them to tend to other patients.

Another nursing role that is influenced by telemedicine is the use of technology to deliver nursing care to patients. Just like the medical and surgica