Applying Agile principles in the Healthcare industry to improve the quality of care

Running head: HEALTHCARE
Healthcare
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Topic Title: Applying Agile principles in the Healthcare industry to improve the quality of care.
Introduction
One of the chief priorities of the heath care industry is to focus on the quality of care
provided to the healthcare service users. The chief aim of the healthcare industry is to ensure
positive health outcomes of the patients. Using the agile methodology in the healthcare industry
has the potential to optimize the process as well as needs for treatments that can be delivered
both quickly as well as efficient software based heritage of agile, differentiate itself from the lean
software based heritage, which has its origin in the manufacturing industry. The term agile can
be defined as team based iterative software development methodology. The agile framework can
be defined as a model that contains process groups that run in a logical order within a defined
period of time. Pharmaceuticals are suffering from large price hikes when it comes to vital drugs.
According to a recent survey, the average spending of drugs has got increase by 456.5 billion
dollar in the year 2018 (Banos et al., 2015). When it comes to the patients over 60, they are
found to require increased healthcare under tight budget restrictions.
Due to increasing cost of products, healthcare organizations are finding it highly difficult
to provide high quality services to the healthcare service users. Along with this, . Currently, not
all patients can afford medical treatment due to low income or insurance policies and, therefore,
affect the overall state of the economy of the nation. However, one cannot ignore the fact that it
is the right of all the citizens to get easy access to the healthcare departments on time. From
several researchers, it has been found that the agile principles if implemented in the healthcare
management system have the potentiality to deal with the above mentioned issues. The chief aim
behind the development of the agile framework includes minimizing the enormous time lag

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between the business requirements and the delivery of the technology to answer the requirements
of the consumers. Considering the fact that majority of the developed countries like U.S. are
suffering from gaining population. The need of healthcare facility has got increased to a great
extent. According to a survey, by the year 2020, the heath care needs in developed countries like
Australia UK an US will get increased by 17.2 percent. Health care organizations are facing
issues to cope up with the rapidly increasing heath care needs. The increasing demand of heath
care service within a affordable price range is making it difficult for organizations to provide
high quality heath care service to patients irrespective of their financial status The 4 chief values
of the agile framework that can be implemented in the contemporary healthcare system include,
Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools, Working Software Over Comprehensive
Documentation, Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation and Responding to Change
Over Following a Plan. The Agile methodology can optimize the healthcare process for
treatment to be provided to the patients on time. The managers of health care organization are
working on creating, updating as well as constantly improving the processes associated with
healthcare facilities.
Problem statement and justification
The chief issues faced by the contemporary healthcare organization include lack of financial
capacity to cope up with the enhanced healthcare needs, it management issues, lack of
appropriate number of skilled staffs and other human resource related issues. Providers are
facing enhanced regulatory changes, coding updates, increased costs, secuirity issues as well as
disruptive technology. One of the major frameworks that have the potential to solve the above
mentioned issues is the Agile management system.

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In order to create, update as well as continuously improve the healthcare processes, the top
priorities of the healthcare service providers inclide providing appropriate levels of patient care
and patient care quality, as well as learning about patient and health plan member populations
and optimizing costs for health care delivery. Considering the act that the mentioned proprieties
are highly focused on the process efficiencies as well as patient health management outcomes,
the health care managers are learning and implementing agile methodologies that is focused on
understanding as well as improving the value of the consumers. In case of the healthcare service,
this indicates focusing on both the aspects of the health care service users as well as heath care
service providers.
When it comes to the contemporary system, a good number of issues can be detected.
One of the chief issues in the contemporary healthcare system includes IT management issues.
While the information technology has proven to be highly beneficial to the healthcare industry, it
has also raised issues of security as well as regulatory compliance to the healthcare service users
protection laws like the accountability act and the health insurance portability act. According to
Sinthamrongruk, Dahal & Yanchinda, (2018), in the year 2017, the largest number of data
breaches had taken place within health services that is comprised of 39 percent of all breaches.
One of the chief healthcare issues faced by the healthcare mangers includes offering affordable
healthcare rates despite the rising costs of the pharmaceuticals, healthcare spending as well as
insurance premium. Enhancement in healthcare also allows for larger gaining population.
Considering the fact that the number of heath care service users above the age 60 years is
increasing with time, it is becoming highly difficult for the healthcare service providers to
provide affordable healthcare services to the huge number of service users within a highly
limited number of cost.