Under the Medicaid policy, there is a range of waste sources. According to Lallemand (2012), there are about 30% of Medicaid spendings could be avoided. There are four categories that account for most of the unnecessary resource allocation including failures of care delivery, care coordination failures, administrative complexity, and overtreatment. The first category is the errors of nurses, physicians, surgeons, and other medical staff that worsen the state of a patient. These mistakes require additional resources from a healthcare facility to correct them. For instance, a wrong diagnosis could result in wrong treatment procedures and, as a result, worse health outcomes. In such a situation, medical care providers will be required to diagnose and treat the same patient again instead of focusing on others. Additionally, the patient could file a lawsuit against the clinic that would even further diminish its resources.
There are also issues of inadequate spending resulting from a lack of standardized procedures that require physicians to waste their time on billing (Lallemand, 2012). Healthcare professionals have to spend a considerable portion of their time on paperwork instead of helping patients. That could lead to worse health outcomes and a decrease in patient satisfaction levels. Coordination failures also can invoke unnecessary spendings. For example, delayed or premature transfers from an intensive setting to a high dependency one could result in readmission, which also bears a heavy cost on the healthcare facility and, ultimately, on the whole, healthcare system.
Overtreatment also results in the waste of resources. Some healthcare providers may order unnecessary treatment stemming from bias and outdated methods of care delivery. This leads to unwise resource allocation and fewer patients treated, which is the cause of budget management problems.
References
Kelly, P. (2015). Essentials of nursing leadership & management (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
Lallemand, N. (2012). Reducing waste in health care.