Subject: Healthcare or if anyone can recommend where to post this question Imagi
ID: 159218 • Letter: S
Question
Subject: Healthcare or if anyone can recommend where to post this question
Imagine you are the supervisor of the health information management (HIM) department in a large outpatient clinic. This department manages patient records. Complaints about your department are becoming more frequent and intense than in the past. Some clinic employees have complained that the HIM department takes too long to retrieve patient records. Others have expressed dismay over the rudeness of HIM staff. You decide to talk about these problems with employees throughout the clinic.
The clinic's receptionists responds to you defensively. They tell you that the HIM staff won't answer the phone and they they want some backup when they are busy with patients. You talk to the HIM staff and find their stories are just as negative. They say they are being charged with more responsibilities but have not additional help. They also complain that the receptionists transfers calls that they should be handling. The clinic's nurses are also upset with the HIM staff; they claim the department does not help them locate patient charts, causing long wait times for patients. The clinic's physicians say they cannot assume additional task to alleviate the situation because their days are already so chaotic.
1. What improvement tool would you use to identify possible reasons for the increase in complaints about the HIM department?
2. What improvement tool would you use to gather data to confirm the reasons for the complaints about the HIM department?
3. You hypothesize that the complaints spike on certain days of the week. What improvement tool would you use to analyze this theory?
4. The HIM staff tallies information about the cause of complaints. What improvement tool would you use to prioritize the problems? 5. What improvement tool would you use to define the current process for retrieving patient records?
6. You believe that cooperation between the clinic receptionists and HIM staff would improve if phone responsibilities were more clearly defined. To whom would you assign the tasks of defining roles and responsibilities?
7. After redesigning the record retrieval process, you want to monitor the effectiveness of your action. What improvement tool would you use to determine whether the number of complaints has decreased?
Explanation / Answer
1. There are various tools for performance improvement. There are quantitative tools like bar graph, stratification, line graph, pareto chart, control chart, scatter diagram and check sheet and qualitative tools like brainstorming, flow chart, work flow diagrams, cause and effect diagrams, affinity analysis, force field analysis and prioritization tools.
I would use brainstorming to find out the possible reasons for the increase in complaints about the HIM department. In this the reason for a specific problem can be identified by all the gathering the ideas about the collected by the members. In this case all the problems of the employees are recorded like not answering the phone calls, taking too much time in retrieving patient records, rudeness of the HIM staff with the employees. To find out the reason of the complaints increase I would talk about these problems with various employess throughout the clinic.
2. To gather data in order to confirm complaints about the HIM department, I would use cause and effect diagram. It will tell about the direct as well as potential cause for each problem. It combines brainstorming as well as visual aids to reach conclusion to any problem. In this we write all the problems of the people in a sticky note and then group those problems and their reasons which are similar in a diagram. In this way we can confirm the reasons for that problem.
3. We can use stratification for addressing the problems which hike on certain days. In this approach we can break the data into various categories. After that we can visually in which days the problems are maximum. After identifying the problems we can assign them to different individuals.
5. For this I would use top down flow chart. This is useful for showing each step of the process, redone tasks, problems with waiting area etc. This approach visualizes the process fully and gives a better ideas about what is happening exactly. This will be useful for retrieving patient records.