Business Architecture of Hospitals - Part 12

Organizational policies in the healthcare sector are a difficult area to manage. The reason is that these policies have a generic character but should serve a specific application.

Policies are the translation of the hospital strategy but are detailed for a certain domain. So there are pure medical policies, ICT, human resources, infrastructural policies.

Policies are derived from corporate values. One of such a value could be that the hospital operates on an evidence based way. This is often for the smaller hospitals that have limited space for research and development and follow the trends in the market. Academic or university hospitals can combine such a principle with a more innovative directive to pioneer in certain areas for which the hospital has specialized.

As there are more corporate values, there are also more policies that have to be managed in combination. Innovation and research may be a driver for an academic hospital; "patient safety" is a policy that overrules all other policies in the situation of a conflict.

Policies can be developed "on-the-job." Basically a policy is formed after events and conflicts have already occurred. At the operation start of a new organization there are no policies yet and as things happen, a pattern raises of recurring issues. Policies are like the jurisprudence of law; many things that have happened resemble previous situations. Policies make sure that the decision taking process will be speed up. It is no use to dedicate time to issues that you have dealt with before. Just do what you have done before where the measure seemed to have worked out.

This works until there is a real change, a new conflict or a change in the environment where a new measure is required. And a new policy will be "established" as more of these new cases pass the management agenda.