Role of Health Care Manager

The manager for health care is a person tasked with the responsibility of directing, planning as well as coordinating medical or health services. Health care managers (HCMs) work within clinics, hospitals, insurance companies, private practices alongside rehabilitation facilities among others. Typically, they work in assistance with other health care providers towards creating and expanding various policies for health care. This assists in improving quality care and support care provided for an actual delivery of health care system. Health care managers have the capability to work at different organizational levels (Ward et al., 2014). The levels might be at entry level or rather at various senior levels where they concentrate on regulations and policies of such organizations. Notably, at Bachelor level, managers for health care may work at entry levels as well as being providers of health care. Also, at master’s or rather doctorate level, most of the health care managers get employment at various senior positions at the management level. There are some settings, focus as well as levels of health care professionals within the nowadays health care structure. This is permitting flexibility in favor of every Health Care Manager (HCM) in establishing perfect position towards suiting their interests, strengths as well as experience.

For the past period, a smaller percentage of HCM had the duty to keep abreast of various transformations to policies and laws about health care. Since laws were hard to change, such proportion of the HCM duties were minimal. For the current years, policy transformations, as well as reforms, have turned out to be the new way in support of workers within the health care sectors. The changes and improvements have made the roles and responsibilities of HCM to easy.

Functions, Roles, and Responsibilities of HCM

Strategic planning

Essentially, health care managers are seen to be the business persons within the medical practice. They are the administrators who are responsible for making major business decisions as well as steering strategic planning within an organization. Planning assists in creating vision alongside direction, which makes health care facilities to move forward regarding growth and development. HCM usually works for hand in hand with medical staff and medical boards towards ensuring that the goals of the clinic are aligning to the budget, practitioner goals as well as community needs.

Spokesperson

In case the media try to find any information from the organization, then it is the manager who serves as the spokesperson of the health care facility. However, most of the large medical institutions are having full-time spokespersons or rather public relations officers. In such cases, health care managers are giving information to be disseminated to the public via the public relation officers of the hospitals (Ward et al., 2014). Or in some instances, HCM convenes press conferences or at times delegates such duty to the public relation officer. The manager might look at times field queries from national or local news reporters whenever he needs to give a response to any facility information. This provides health care facilities to have an appropriate chain of command when it comes to clearing various information which might be in the public domain, bad or good.

Collaboration

By and large, it the duty and responsibility of the HCM to collaborate with leaders of medical staff when it comes to coordinating the daily duties within the hospital. HCM coordinates every departmental budget together each departmental head. HCM discusses supply needs and medical equipment with delegates, physicians as well as following up tasks associated with general operation of the medical practices. Maintaining an excellent relationship with nurses, doctors indeed form essential duties of HCM in keeping their morale to be high (Ward et al., 2014).

Staff Management

HCM similarly has the role and responsibility of doing oversight roles for the team in an attempt of assisting in running daily activities within a facility. The day-to-day operations of the health care facility incorporate management of the office staff, managing billing departments together with other departments within the hospital. Team management is seen as the major challenging on functions of HCM. This is because the manager would be making critical decisions on performance evaluation of every worker within an organization and thus might be challenging when doing performance appraisal. Proper management of staff improves working relationship among the employees.

Clerical duties

Health care managers are at times referred to as health care executives since they have the responsibility managing various administrative tasks within the hospitals, physician practices as well as medical laboratories. Within small medical facilities, HCM might be the ones having responsibilities of answering phones, processing insurance claims, filing the records of patients as well as issuing alongside paying various bills for the hospital (Koppel et al., 2005). However, in most of the larger health care organizations then HCMs might have sufficient duties thus assigning clerical duties to junior officers. For instance, a facility might have an administrator in charge of doing the processing of payments for patients. Besides, most of the new workers might merely carry out tasks while they are under the supervision of health care managers.

Competencies for the HCM

Nowadays, HCMs are required to possess management talents which are sufficiently sophisticated towards matching an augmented complexity within the health care set up. HCMs are needed to show measurable outcomes as well as effective when it comes to practice anchored on evidence. Similarly, academic and professional programs are highlighting competency attainment associated with effectiveness within the place of work. The shift towards evidence based management for HCM has typically steered towards several efforts towards defining skills that are essential for any health care organization. Therefore, the competency domains which are important for all the health care managers include:

• Professionalism
• Leadership
• Health care system acquaintance
• Management of communication and associations
• Knowledge and business skills
• Strategic planning and marketing

Health care managers are making strategic plans through doing budgets for an organization, planning on paying workers within an organization as well as doing all the what an organization needs to make everything work. Similarly, HCMs are equally involved in marketing through doing excellent public relations. Marketing is also done by HCM through ensuring that an organization offers the best services for the clients. This will provide a continuous flow of customers due to the excellent services being delivered (Mira et al., 2016)

Conclusion

Health care managers are essential in driving and organizing operations in the medical institution. It is for that matter important for all health care workers to look into various ways in which they are likely to better the services. Good health care system in place markets an organization. Besides, such systems are set by good HCM.

References

Koppel, R., Metlay, J. P., Cohen, A., Abaluck, B., Localio, A. R., Kimmel, S. E., & Strom, B. L. (2005). Role of computerized physician order entry systems in facilitating medication errors. Jama, 293(10), 1197-1203.

Mira, J. J., Carrillo, I., Fernandez, C., Vicente, M. A., & Guilabert, M. (2016). Design and Testing of the Safety Agenda Mobile App for Managing Health Care Managers’ Patient Safety Responsibilities. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 4(4).

Ward, V., West, R., Smith, S., McDermott, S., Keen, J., Pawson, R., & House, A. (2014). The role of informal networks in creating knowledge among health-care managers: a prospective case study. Health Services and Delivery Research, 2(12).