Describe specific initiatives, laws, and accreditation standards that can be leveraged to improve health care quality and enhance performance improvement

Assignment 1

Health care costs in the United States continue to increase. Despite the high cost of care for health care in the United States, quality indicators and outcomes lag behind other countries when compared to certain dimensions of performance.
For this assignment, analyze and discuss the relationship between quality and cost in health care in the United States, and research and identify how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) attempts to reduce costs and improve quality. Based on your research of the PPACA, provide an argument for whether the PPACA has been a success in reducing costs and improving quality.
• What did you learn from your classmate’s posting?
• What additional questions do you have after reading the posting?
• What clarification do you need regarding the posting?
• What differences or similarities do you see between your posting and other classmates’ postings?

For assistance with your assignment, please use your text, Web resources, and all course materials.

Assignment 3

Health care organizations (HCOs) often struggle with performance improvement and with effectively communicating performance improvement results to their internal and external stakeholders. It is equally important to communicate your successes externally for marketing and internally to continue to build on your successes. The messaging to these two groups, however, is very different.
For this project, discuss the following:
• Describe specific initiatives, laws, and accreditation standards that can be leveraged to improve health care quality and enhance performance improvement.
• Develop a communications strategy to achieve effective and efficient communication of performance data and performance improvement initiatives.
• Include a plan for strategic messaging in communications to employees (to effect change) and communications to the general public (for marketing purposes).