Alameda Health System Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

"Alameda Health System" (AHS) describes a safety net health system that is taking into account the application of Affordable Care Act and health delivery environment. It takes the perspective of senior management, especially the Chief Medical Officer for the system who joined one year earlier. The case begins in late 2014, when the CEO of 9 years declared he was leaving AHS to eventually become CEO of a Detroit health system. The leftover staff was inexperienced.

At exactly the same time, the system was experiencing a fiscal downturn, brought on in part by the loss of many low-income, formerly county indigent patients who picked subsidized private health insurance plans on the brand new state health exchange that contracted chiefly with AHS's two biggest competitions. AHS additionally had yet to integrate clinically or administratively with two community hospitals, each of which were in poor financial health, recently acquired as element of a strategy to diversify the AHS payer mix.

The system faced running challenges common to many freely-owned safety net hospitals, including: a unionized work force; an independent, mission-driven medical staff that had grown weary of administrative employee turnover; a poorly working revenue group system; unprofitable contracts with managed care plans; relatively few commercially insured patients or contracts; long wait times for attention; deficiency of phone and transport access to providers; and a low-income population with numerous poorly managed chronic diseases, including mental illness and substance abuse, in addition to a high rate of violent crime. The case demands that students may synthesize other applicable organizational and environmental trends in order to advocate and appraise the actions that senior management should take and understand essential aspects of the ACA.

PUBLICATION DATE: September 01, 2015 PRODUCT #: PH5020-HCB-ENG

This is just an excerpt. This case is about ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

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