Fielder Community Hospital (FCH) confronts difficulties, such as inefficiencies in handling and accessing paper information across its
Question:
Fielder Community Hospital (FCH) confronts difficulties, such as inefficiencies in handling and accessing paper information across its five campuses. Five HIM departments are suggested to be consolidated into one site under one director to increase productivity, patient happiness, and cost-effectiveness. The consolidation will harmonize processes and patient treatment, eliminate hospital patient satisfaction ratings inconsistencies, and prepare for the next technology developments. Considering staff members' varying levels of technical preparedness, employee training and support for remote work will be essential.
Current process explanation: Fielder Community Hospital (FCH) operates with five separate HIM (Health Information Management) departments, each located in different campuses. These departments handle medical records, including retrieval, indexing, and scanning. The medical records system is a hybrid one, with a combination of electronic and paper records stored at each facility. Physicians, physician assistants (PAs), and nurse practitioners (NPs) at FCH serve patients across all five campuses. The HIM staff from each facility retrieve paper records from the floor of their respective facilities and bring them back to their HIM department for processing. Each of the five HIM departments has its own director, with sub-departments responsible for tasks such as release of information (ROI), coding, and deficiency tracking/data management. The staffing of these departments has traditionally been structured per facility, leading to duplication of efforts and potential inconsistencies in processes.
SOLUTION PROPOSAL Addressing the issues that limit Fielder Community Hospital's (FCH) ability to meet performance standards necessitates a multi-faceted solution that involves the centralization of HIM departments. By merging the HIM departments from all five campuses into a single centralized location, FCH can effectively overcome the challenges of fragmented record keeping, inconsistent patient satisfaction, technological gaps, costly and error-prone record retrieval, and redundancy. This solution substantially benefits the hospital's operations and patient care outcomes. Centralizing the HIM departments from diverse FCH campuses into a single location forms the core of the proposed solution. This approach eliminates the existing fragmentation and ensures consistent processes across all campuses. A centralized location enables standardization of workflows, policies, and procedures, leading to streamlined operations, reduced redundancies, and optimal resource utilization. The sharing of resources and expertise allows the hospital to maintain efficient and lean HIM operations, promoting cost-effectiveness and improved productivity.
Project Goals:
1. Improve efficiency: By consolidating the HIM divisions into a single location, the goal is to streamline operations and minimize redundancies. As a result, productivity and cost-effectiveness will improve.
2. Enhance patient satisfaction: By synchronizing systems and patient care, the goal is to reduce inconsistencies in hospital patient satisfaction ratings. Centralizing HIM departments will provide consistent and efficient medical record handling, improving patient experience.
Objectives:
1. Consolidate HIM departments: The objective is to consolidate the five distinct HIM departments from various campuses into a single consolidated location. This will remove fragmentation and guarantee that processes are consistent across all campuses.
2. Standardize workflows, policies, and procedures: The objective is consistency in workflows, policies, and procedures throughout the centralized HIM department. This will help to streamline operations, remove redundancies, and maximize resource use.
BUSINESS CASE DELIVERABLES:
- Physical Infrastructure/Workspace Setup
- Staff Transition and Training
- Department Restructuring/Reassignment of Job Roles
- Integration of Existing HIM operations
- Change Management Strategy
BUDGET ALLOCATIONS
Telephone (on-site and remote, per employee: 197 employees in total) $500
Office supplies (per department: 5 departments) $1,500
Laptop (remote, per employee: 72 remote employees) $1,600
Desktop (on-site, per employee: 125 on-site employees) $2,200
Scanner (x4) $8,500
Copy machine $4,000
RESOURCES NEEDED
G.Using the waterfall methodology, develop a communication plan for the process improvement project, including an explanation of the purpose, objective, frequency, approach, and medium. 1.Explain how you will incorporate project meetings into your communication plan. H.Explain how progress will be monitored during the process improvement project. Please provide your sources. |
Expert Answer:
