The California Sutter Health Approach

Sutter Health is a nonprofit organization, which the headquarters, located in Sacramento, California. It makes available health care and other hospital services to patients. The California Sutter health took this name from a Californian pioneer named John Sutter. In 1918, the leaders of the community built the earliest Sutter hospital within the locality of their fort, and replaced an old house, which was a makeshift hospital, due to the influenza outbreak. Other hospitals affiliated with Sutter health were later opened such as California pacific medical center. Many facilities of healthcare of the Sutter health network became charitable hospitals for the members of the community copping with rising epidemics, population, earthquakes, floods, and fires (Shallit, 2002).

In 1996, California health and Sutter health care system united forming California Sutter health. With the new twenty first century, new advances were brought in the technology of health care, and Sutter health was one of the health systems that installed safety technology of bar code medication and an intensive unit care that was electronic, in United States. In the year 2004, it was among the hospitals that were dropped by the system of Public Employees Retirement in California from its HMO networks due to its concerns on cost. Additionally, Sutter health was able to implement a wide policy system in the same year, and the policy offered health and charity care discounts for both underinsured and uninsured patients.

In the year 2006, the health care expanded the policy, and started offering automated discounts to patients that were uninsured. Later, it agreed with other health systems on lawsuits concerning the billing of the patients that were uninsured. Currently, the Sutter health network has eight physician foundations namely; cancer centers, long-term centers, regional home health, hospice organization, twenty four acute care hospitals, and research and university institutes (Mechanic, 2005).

The hospitals and the doctors provide various clinical services together with children’s health, cancer care, diabetes care, complementary medicine, heart and mental care, sleep disorders, bariatrics, orthopedics, transplant services and childbirth and pregnancy. It also operates in centers of outpatient surgery in thirteen communities and Sutter express health care clinics, which is based on three retails in Sacramento region. They provide highest, safest quality accessible care to patients, as they play their part of making their services affordable.

Sutter health care has also recruited many physicians and placed them conveniently in care centers all over Northern California. This is to that communities have enough doctors near their homes. Sutter medical network has also been created whereby physicians share commitments that are similar in order to offer affordable and exceptional health care when the patients need it always. In addition, health services Californian Sutter Health has been dedicating effort towards lean practices such as hospital designing. To implement such lean projects, Sutter Health refers to “five big ideas” which are recommended to project teams. The first proposal is collaboration, whereby a design is agreed upon after an interactive discussion with all stakeholders (Tzortzopoulos, 2010).

There are increased relations amongst all the project participants. In building health care facilities, collaboration, and innovation, a considerable amount of learning are necessary as these projects are long-term and complex. Projects ought to be a group of commitments, and excellent coordination is expected so that the management has a responsibility to activate and speak about unequaled networks. They should view the project as a whole and not in pieces, and priorities should be given to the whole project since failure of one piece is ultimately failure of the whole project. Another idea is learning a decisively couple action whereby a constant development of schedule, a general project value, and cost is possible when project members learn by engaging in it.

California Sutter health has also been using accounting practices to solve its collective problem. Before using these practices, they could not access information on key operational and financial indicators such as cash collections and A/R days. Consequently, staff and managers frequently waited until it is the end of the month to track progress, set benchmarks and even the making of critical decisions of the business. Additionally, the accounting system of patients in the hospitals could not permit managers to analyze and isolate data or produce information concerning demand. The region instead, relied specifically on trained programmer to make this reports, which regularly resulted to delays when identifying and correcting problems (Shallit, 2002).

The office of the central business organization suffered from lack real time of information. They only had access to a list of outstanding accounts; therefore, accounting representatives were unable to check on the progress of the analytics in order to improve productivity to reach the set goals. Sutter health decided to choose my mentor TM and receivables manager from med assets application so as to give staff and managers real-time information that will help them do their job, as well as, intelligence to work excellently and make more knowledgeable and profitable decisions.

The receivable manager, will help managers in charge of the facilities in the nine regions always receive information regarding key indicators of performance, for instance, cash collections and A/R days. Application of digital dashboard allows managers analyze and identify potential trends and issues every day. Managers have also able to make detailed reports immediately. Receivables manager will also permit users analyze and isolate data for each staff member, and this enables a problem be resolved faster and increase control on negotiations (Spetz, Seago & Mitchell, 1999).

This new approach of California Sutter health to governance that is designed to offer coordinated care to patients has solved a problem that has been facing many people due to the rising cost of medical bills. To access to all people in California they should create regions that will have a structure of governance to oversee the medical hospitals and foundations of Sutter. With these foundations, more hospitals will be created benefiting the community.