United Healthcare Case Study

United Healthcare is a healthcare organization with wings that spread across all states in the US. The body is headquartered in the city of Minnetonka in the state of Minnesota. The company partners with Optum to create the UnitedHealth Group and has readied its operations to be able to meet the healthcare needs of citizens in the coming decade. These as well as the different strategies that can help make their operations more efficient require a more detailed analysis to identify their use for the company’s performance.

Readiness of Meeting Patients’ Needs in the Next Decade

United Healthcare has already got certain strategies aimed at making sure that all healthcare needs of their customers are met in the near future. First, the company has ensured that their services are available in virtually all regions of the United States. They have also ascertained that their services are tailored to the needs of all persons regardless of their age or the current life status. They have plans for children, the working class, and the senior citizens (United Healthcare, n.d.). In its operations and strategies, the company focuses on three pillars. The first is possession of enabling technology that can be advanced with time. The second is availability of adequate clinical resources, and the last one is the effective management of actionable data on the state of the healthcare industry. These capabilities guarantee that the company possesses adaptability and flexibility which allows them to handle the regular and emerging changes in the medical field.

In addressing the needs of their customers, the company uses a few strategies. First, it provides insurance policies for all its customers. The policies vary from family to individual covers. The company also supports Medicaid and Medicare plans (United Healthcare, n.d.). To make the insurance more efficient, the company adjusts them to meet specific customer needs. For example, allowing the patient the privilege of working with a personal physician. The company also owns networks of healthcare service providers such as clinics, medical centers, and doctors catering for the needs of the covered patients. The company also has a drug prescription list that covers a wide variety of drugs under their insurance policies to cushion the patients from the burden of extra costs incurred in buying prescription drugs on their own. The company runs two non-profit foundations, the United Healthcare Children’s Foundation and the United Health Foundation. These two help to create cost-effectiveness in healthcare, increase the well-being of the community, and provide health services that are absent in family insurance covers. The organization achieves this by offering grants. All these services provided by the company show their readiness in meeting the healthcare needs of the U.S population.

Strategies for Network Growth

The company is in need of expanding their network. They are already serving all the states in the US, but there is room for expansion within the country and also out of the North America region. For example, such areas as the Middle East are growing in economic power, but their healthcare services as well as health insurance are not well developed. The company can choose to open branches such prospective regions of the world. Within the country, the company can decide to bring in additional healthcare providers and improve their operation. This way they would either create new facilities or be able to utilize the networks already belonging to these groups by, for example, increasing the number of hospitals that accept their insurance covers. The emergence of the insurtech industry also offers chances to expand their network. Insurtech involves the integration of new technology in the insurance industry which aims to make insurance covers available to everyone especially low-income earners, and also seeks to make the process of issuing and receiving benefits from insurance easier (Solodkiy, 2016). Therefore, the company can use insurtech to reach more customers by availing insurance policies even through mobile phones which almost everyone owns.

Strategies for Nurse Staffing

Adequate nurse staffing is a crucial task of a sensible management targeting at the success of their healthcare facility. Understaffing of nurses’ significance causes a facility to spend more on paying for overtime hours which reduce the morale and productivity of the nurses and results in patient’s more extended stay in hospitals. The first strategy that will help United Health increase the size of their nursing staff is to ensure that they are well paid. Most nurses will change their workplace if promised a better pay elsewhere. The company should also ensure that all their nurses operate in a suitable environment. There should be precise mechanisms that guide the resolution of nurse conflicts, and necessary measures should be put in place to reduce work hazards. Such strategies will ensure the company does not face a shortage of nursing. The company should focus on achieving an appropriate and sustainable nurse to patient ratio but only hire the nurses that are well qualified as well as offer them chances to advance in their professionalism.

Strategies for Resource Management

Efficient management of resources is essential to the success of any organization. The company’s excellent performance as one of the best health providers suggests that they have implemented the efficient ways of managing their resources. A few of them can be bettered to make their operations and performance more successful. The first method of achieving dynamic resource management is ensuring that the company sets a few goals based on their priority and channels all the available resources towards their achievement. For example, the aging population is rapidly increasing in the United States with an estimated 25% of the population expected to be above the age of 65 by 2050. Therefore, resources should be directed towards creating healthcare packages aimed at this group. Lastly, the company should be willing to invest in their resources, especially the human resource (Kern, 2015), since their efforts are the main contributors to the success of the business.

Strategies for Patient Satisfaction

The profitability of any company is based on satisfied customers driving their success. The company has come up with specific plans aimed at ensuring their patient’s satisfaction. The first step in achieving this is learning about the demographics of the consumers. For example, in the United States 17% of the population, which is about 60 million individuals, is made up of the Hispanics or the Latinos. United Healthcare realizes the importance of satisfying this group of clients and hence decided on setting up the United Healthcare Latino Health Solutions (United Healthcare, n.d.). This part of United Healthcare helps the Hispanics to receive proper medical services despite the challenges that they may face in communicating in English. This approach helps create customer satisfaction and approval among the Latinos. To further implement suitable strategies, the company needs to initiate avenues through which customers can give feedback on the services they receive from the company for the organization to be able to use this information in devising a new and appropriate service base.

In conclusion, United Healthcare is successful and well prepared for changes that might occur in the healthcare sector in the days to come. The company possesses particular capabilities that give them an evident advantage over their competitors. Overall, the organization has implemented successful strategies that have propelled them into being one of the leading healthcare services providers in the United States of America. However, several other strategies can be applied to help them perform better, expand into new regions, and have higher rates of customer approval, eventually ensuring that they cement their position as a market leader.