HA599 Capstone: Findings, Recommendations, and Applications

This capstone project, presented for a Master of Healthcare Administration degree at Purdue University Global, investigates critical issues within the U.S. healthcare system. The project identifies significant challenges, including disparities in healthcare access, the high cost of prescription drugs, and the opioid crisis, supported by relevant research and data. The author offers three key recommendations to address these issues: increasing funding for healthcare services to ensure accessibility, reducing the availability of opioids to combat overdose deaths, and implementing policies to make prescription drugs more affordable and accessible. These recommendations are thoroughly justified, considering their potential impact on improving health outcomes and addressing systemic problems within healthcare policy. The project emphasizes the need for innovative funding models, harm reduction strategies, and policy changes to improve healthcare for all Americans.

FINDINGS 1
FINDINGS
Name of the Author
A Capstone Presented in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Healthcare Administration
PURDUE UNIVERSITY GLOBAL
Month Year

FINDINGS 2
Introduction
The healthcare systems in the United States excel in various places like in research,
clinical care, and innovation. However, there are some places where disparities in health status
and obstacles in accessing healthcare services can be seen (Ruchman, Singh & Stapleton, 2016).
There are several healthcare policies that include the development and implementation of various
rules, laws, and regulations to manage the healthcare system of the nation. In the United States of
America, most people utilize the third-party system for the payment of healthcare. This implies
that a health insurance plan is required to reimburse the cost of the healthcare services provided
by the doctors to the patients. Most of the people in the nation utilize either public or private
health insurance. Some people do not take any healthcare insurance also ("Healthcare policy in
the United States - Ballotpedia", 2019). Through this capstone, various issues in the healthcare
policies and their implementation have been observed. These challenges in healthcare policies
include issues in accessing healthcare services, negligence in healthcare services, management of
chronic diseases, and cost of the healthcare services, etc. Three recommendations are also
provided to address and improve the issues in healthcare policies based on the needs in the
industry. These recommendations include the provision of sufficient funds to fulfill the
requirements of the people who require it urgently, to reduce the availability of a prescribed
drug, opioid to decrease the rate of mortality caused due to its overdose, and to make the
prescription drugs available and affordable to everyone.
Use and Application of Findings
As described above, there are various healthcare policies in the United States to assist
people in coping with healthcare systems. The use and application of these findings contribute to
determining various issues in healthcare policies. According to the findings, in implementing

FINDINGS 3
these healthcare policies, people face a lot of challenges. In the United States, there are around
7% of people who are living without insurance. Due to this high rate of uninsured people, the
uninsured people had faced a lot of negative consequences such as financial insecurity, poor
health, disturbances to care and many more. However, the rate of uninsured people has dropped
after some changes in healthcare policies. But this needs to be improved to allow every
individual gets insurance coverage and its benefits (Obama, 2016).
Another challenge faced by the people in healthcare systems to fulfill their basic
healthcare needs is the pricing of prescription drugs. In recent years, it has been observed that the
rate of the cost of prescription drugs intensify every year. This result in inaccessibility of the
prescription drugs by the people who actually need them. Additionally, the rate of misuse of
opioid is increasing every day and a large number of American die every day due to the overdose
of opioid (Mody & Blackwood, 2018).
One more challenge in healthcare policies in the United States is the lack of availability
of staff members in healthcare systems. This is due to the inefficient working of human resources
because of which the health workers are unavailable when they are urgently required. Another
challenge which has been faced by the healthcare systems is the lack of adequate funds. Due to
the insufficient funds, the citizens are unable to utilize healthcare services when required
(Roncarolo, Boivin, Denis, Hébert & Lehoux, 2017).
Several recommendations that must be followed by the healthcare systems to improve
healthcare policies.
Recommendation 1:

FINDINGS 4
As described in the above section, the funds provided for the fulfillment of the healthcare
needs of the citizens are not sufficient enough to fulfill the requirement of every individual when
they need it the most. However, the challenge in having adequate funds accounts for only 8.2%
of the challenges faced by the healthcare systems. But it has a greater impact on the availability
of the healthcare systems to the needy people at the time of utmost requirement. Therefore, it has
been recommended that the funding provided for the contentment of the needs of the healthcare
system must be enhanced with substantial modifications in the funding models. It is required to
determine some innovative models for funding to increase financial support for public health. It
has been recommended to encourage merging and braiding of funds from different sources. To
support fundamental infrastructure with community-level functioning, the funding must be
determined. This will address the social factors of health. It is important to have safe, flexible,
and adequate funds in a controlled environment for funding. For this purpose, the cost of the
health services with a definite evaluation of funding sources should be known to arrange
essential services and organization building. Due to the lack of sufficient funds, there is the
availability of inadequate infrastructure, issues in logistics, and issues in supply distribution and
storage, etc. Therefore, it is very important to raise funding for providing sufficient healthcare
systems to every citizen in the United States. This will help in improving the health conditions
and decreasing mortality rates caused due to unavailability of the services of the healthcare
systems (DeSalvo et al., 2017).
Recommendation 2:
A large number of people die every year due to the overdose of prescription medication
opioid including illicit fentanyl and heroin. To reduce the disorders caused due to the overdose of
opioid, there are several programs for treatment and reduction of the harm are recommended.

FINDINGS 5
However, there are certain treatment programs but they are available to only a limited set of
people. It is recommended to increase its availability so that more and more people affected with
an opioid overdose can utilize and benefit from them. According to several data, it has been
reported that only one-quarter of patients affected with a disorder caused by opioid overdose
received the treatment for a drug overdose. It has been recommended that the distribution
programs for naloxone must be increased as it can reduce the death rate caused due to opioid
overdose. These programs can help patients by providing life-saving medications to the people
who are close to the victims of drug overdose (Saloner et al., 2018). Additionally, it has been
recommended to reduce the availability of these prescription medications. Also, it is important to
discourage people from using it very frequently. Several approaches must be made for early
recognition of the high-risk behavior to initiate the treatment for opioid overdose disorder.
Another approach which has been recommended to reduce the overdose of opioid is to enhance
the use of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs. This program is mainly designed to avert and
spot the misuse of pharmaceutical controlled dangerous substances. This can be performed by
improving the capability of law enforcement agencies to collect information about opioid usage
through a database which is centralized and state-administered. Certain medications must be
introduced to suppress the effect of the opioid overdose and improve symptoms in the patients.
These are certain interventions that are recommended to improve healthcare systems in the
United States (Salmond & Allread, 2019).
Recommendation 3:
Based on the findings of this capstone, it has been reported that the pricing of prescription
medications is very high due to which it is not affordable to many patients. There are various
policies that are recommended to resolve this issue and serve all patients who require these

FINDINGS 6
medications. It has been recommended to establish and support an expert advisory committee
which is politically autonomous and unbiased. The main purpose of establishing this committee
is to make crucial recommendations based on the pieces of evidence on pharmaceutical policy.
The primary aim of this committee should be to assure the availability and affordability of the
prescription medications to all the people needing it. This committee should ensure generic drug
availability by making strong recommendations to decrease barriers in the timely delivery of
these drugs. Additionally, this committee should observe the evidence and strongly recommend
to have mandatory medications, which have proven clinical advantage from every class of the
drug (Patel et al., 2018). Certain recommendations to reduce the high price of the drugs by
increasing competition between drugs are given to improve the availability of the generic drug.
Additionally, it has been recommended that several healthcare policies should be developed to
educate patients, payers, prescribers, and makers of the policy about the available choices for the
drugs. When the patients will be educated about the choices of available drugs, they can select
the one based on its cost-effectiveness. This will help the patients to have affordable drugs. Thus,
more and more patients can have their treatment on time with the best drug available in the
market (Kesselheim, Avorn & Sarpatwari, 2016). Another healthcare policy which is
recommended to improve the pricing of the prescription drugs is to disclose the actual material
utilized for the manufacture of the drug and production costs to regulators. Additionally, it has
been recommended to make certain policies that limit the confusion of the patient between the
original drug and biosimilar products. This will promote the incorporation of usage of biosimilar
products into clinical practice (Daniel, 2016).

FINDINGS 7
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FINDINGS 8
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