HIM 520 Module 9 Final Project Example

Final Project: Becoming One Department, a Leadership Plan for Sycamore Bend Health Information Management

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

HIM 520: Leading as a HIM Professional

Final Project

[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: Becoming One Department, a Leadership Plan for Sycamore Bend Health Information Management

Executive Summary

A year after Sycamore Bend Health acquired its third hospital, its health information department is one department on paper and three in practice. Trust in leadership ranges from 61% favorable at the flagship to 27% at the acquired hospital, coder turnover reached 21% and release of information runs three different ways. This plan sets four goals for the next twelve months: rebuild trust and voice, develop people, unify how work is done with the people who do it and keep skilled staff. It requires about $96,000 for training, a pay harmonization already approved by human resources and no new positions. The director asks leadership to endorse the plan and to review its measures each quarter.

Leadership Philosophy

My approach combines clarity with relationship. Judge and Piccolo (2004) found that both inspiring, developmental leadership and clear expectations tied to recognition predicted follower satisfaction and performance, while passive leadership did not. In health care teams, Cummings et al. (2018) found that relational, people-focused leadership was linked to better outcomes for staff than task-focused leadership. I will therefore set explicit, fair expectations and measure results, while investing in the relationships and conversations that let people raise problems and grow. I will judge my own leadership by whether staff from all three hospitals bring problems to me early and stay.

Diagnosis in Brief

The Milestone One assessment identified four challenges: low trust at the acquired hospital, low willingness to raise concerns at two sites, uncertainty about roles that feeds turnover and divergent procedures across all three hospitals. Exit interviews added unequal pay after the merger, isolation in remote work and the lack of a career path. A performance case showed that merger-driven changes in work, such as redistributed cardiac coding, created skill gaps no one had planned for. None of these problems is unusual after a merger, but together they explain why a department that looks unified on the organization chart still behaves like three.

Goals and Actions

Table 1 lists the four goals and the main actions by quarter.

Table 1. Goals and Actions by Quarter

Note. Plan developed by the author with supervisors and staff design groups.

Why the Order Matters

Trust comes first because every other change depends on it. Edmondson (1999) showed that teams whose members feel safe to speak up engage in more learning and perform better; a department where staff hide problems will not surface the issues the other goals need to solve. Development comes next because it treats each site's expertise as an asset, which answers the acquired hospital's fear that its ways will simply be replaced. Unifying procedures follows, designed by staff groups that include every site. Retention runs throughout, since Hom et al. (2017) describe how people stay when they feel connected and can see a future, which the other three goals are designed to provide.

People Practices

The plan standardizes how people are hired, evaluated, developed and supported. Hiring uses unified job descriptions and a competency assessment. Performance management relies on frequent, task-focused feedback and supportive improvement plans before discipline, as in the Module Four case. Training follows a needs analysis and supports learning on the job; Salas et al. (2012) found that training works when it targets real needs and is reinforced at work. Pay follows a single scale with no cuts, and remote and on-site staff have equal access to advancement.

Integrity Commitments

Leadership in health information management includes protecting the record. The department will not alter records to reduce liability, will add late entries only openly and with their true dates, will code only from documentation and will release only what each request requires. Staff who refuse to do otherwise will be supported. The Module Six case, in which a physician asked for a note to be changed after a fall, will become part of annual training, without names, so every employee knows what to do and whom to call.

Communication

Communication will be two-way and regular. The director will hold a monthly all-staff video meeting with open questions, supervisors will hold weekly team meetings and monthly one-on-ones and a short written update will go out every two weeks. Major changes will be explained in person before they appear in email. Physicians, nursing leaders, finance and human resources will receive quarterly briefings on changes that affect them. Every quarter, the director will also report back to staff on what was heard in surveys and meetings and what changed as a result, closing the loop that the listening sessions showed had been missing.

Measures and Risks

Progress will be measured by engagement survey items on trust, voice and role clarity by site, coder turnover, time to fill positions, coding accuracy by case type, release of information turnaround and misdirected releases. The main risks are that early promises are not kept, that supervisors revert to old habits under pressure and that system budget cuts delay training. Each is addressed by tracking commitments publicly, coaching supervisors and protecting the training budget as a retention investment.

Conclusion

Sycamore Bend's health information department will become one department only when its people trust leadership, see a future for themselves and help shape how work is done. This plan orders the work accordingly, pairs clear expectations with real relationships, protects the integrity of the record and measures progress by site, so that no part of the department is left behind.

References

Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P. M., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.016

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755

Salas, E., Tannenbaum, S. I., Kraiger, K., & Smith-Jentsch, K. A. (2012). The science of training and development in organizations: What matters in practice. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(2), 74-101. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612436661