HIM 440 Module 3 Final Project Milestone One Example

Final Project Milestone One: Starting With the Numbers, Initiation and Benchmarks for Kettle Creek's HIM Strategic Plan

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

HIM 440: Management of Health Information Services

Final Project Milestone One

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

Final Project Milestone One: Starting With the Numbers, Initiation and Benchmarks for Kettle Creek's HIM Strategic Plan

The Module Two summary showed that Kettle Creek Medical Center's health information department faces linked problems in staffing, relationships, productivity and compliance. A strategic plan can address them together, but only if it starts with an agreed purpose and measures everyone trusts. This milestone initiates the plan: it states the purpose and scope, names the sponsor and team, analyzes the department's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and defines the benchmarks the plan will use.

Purpose, Scope and Sponsorship

The plan's purpose is to make the health information department a reliable partner for patient care, revenue and compliance over the next three years. Its scope covers coding, clinical documentation integrity, record completion, release of information, scanning and department staffing. Transcription, which is outsourced, and the hospital's record system, which belongs to information technology, are outside scope except where they affect these functions. The chief financial officer, to whom the department reports, will sponsor the plan and approve its budget requests. The planning team includes the director, the coding manager, a remote coder, a release of information specialist, the documentation integrity lead, a hospitalist who chairs the medical records committee and the leader of the patient accounts office. Including a front-line coder and a physician was deliberate: Harrison et al. (2021) found that change management models in health care consistently emphasize engaging the people affected, and the Module One experience showed the cost of skipping that step.

SWOT Analysis

Table 1 summarizes the department's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, drawn from the team's first two meetings and the data gathered in Module Two.

Table 1. SWOT Analysis of the Health Information Department

Note. Developed by the planning team; composite organization.

Choosing Benchmarks

A benchmark is only useful if everyone calculates it the same way. The team chose eight measures that cover the department's functions and the concerns of its partners, and defined each with a formula, a current value, a target and a data source. Gurd and Gao (2008) examined balanced scorecards in health care organizations and found them adapted to include patient and quality perspectives alongside financial and internal process measures, although implementation varied widely. Following that approach, the team grouped its eight benchmarks into four perspectives: financial, compliance and quality, internal process and people. Table 2 lists them.

Table 2. Performance Benchmarks

Note. Targets proposed by the planning team; to be confirmed with the sponsor.

Why These Measures

Each benchmark answers to someone. Unbilled days matter to finance, delinquency to accreditation and the medical staff, accuracy to compliance and payers, turnaround to patients and requesters and turnover and engagement to the staff who make the others possible. The coding productivity target is deliberately left open: rather than import a number from elsewhere, the coder working group formed after Module One will propose standards by case type, which should make the target both fair and accepted. Pairing productivity with accuracy prevents one from being improved at the other's expense.

Tracking Change Over Time

Monthly numbers bounce around, and a manager who reacts to every rise or fall will chase noise. Mohammed et al. (2008) explain how to build basic control charts so managers can tell routine month-to-month scatter apart from shifts that mean something has changed. The team will plot unbilled days, delinquency and turnaround on control charts, so that the plan's effects can be judged against the department's own baseline rather than a single good or bad month.

Data Collection Calendar

Baseline data for all eight benchmarks will be collected over the next six weeks. Weekly measures will be pulled every Monday by the coding manager, monthly measures on the fifth business day by the director and quarterly measures by the compliance office and human resources. The first scorecard, showing baseline values and targets, will go to the sponsor and the medical records committee at the end of the six weeks, before Milestone Two proposes a process improvement plan.

Planning Risks

Three risks could weaken the plan before it starts. Baseline data may prove unreliable, especially delinquency counts, which depend on how deficiencies are assigned in the record system; the coding manager will audit a sample of 50 deficiencies before the baseline is accepted. The planning team's members all hold full workloads, so meetings will be limited to one hour every two weeks with work done between them. And finance and health information may still disagree about which unbilled accounts belong to which department, so the team will agree on hold codes that separate documentation holds from coding holds before measuring unbilled days.

Conclusion

This milestone gives Kettle Creek's strategic plan a clear purpose, a sponsor, a team that includes the people doing the work, an honest SWOT analysis and eight defined benchmarks on a balanced scorecard. With baseline data in hand, the next milestone can target the process that most affects the department's partners: the path from discharge to a coded, billed and complete record.

References

Gurd, B., & Gao, T. (2008). Lives in the balance: An analysis of the balanced scorecard (BSC) in healthcare organizations. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 57(1), 6-21. https://doi.org/10.1108/17410400810841209

Harrison, R., Fischer, S., Walpola, R. L., Chauhan, A., Babalola, T., Mears, S., & Le-Dao, H. (2021). Where do models for change management, improvement and implementation meet? A systematic review of the applications of change management models in healthcare. Journal of Healthcare Leadership, 13, 85-108. https://doi.org/10.2147/JHL.S289176

Mohammed, M. A., Worthington, P., & Woodall, W. H. (2008). Plotting basic control charts: Tutorial notes for healthcare practitioners. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 17(2), 137-145. https://doi.org/10.1136/qshc.2004.012047