As a senior HIM director, you are tasked with a project of finding a solution to your current HIM operation. You identified the problems to be inefficiency resulting from redundancy, inconsistent patient satisfaction, fragmented record keeping, costly and error-prone retrieval and technological gaps. Based on these issues, you decided to consolidate the five departments into one.

Discuss the scope of the process improvement project by doing the following specific to consolidating the HIM departments.

1.List the project deliverables.

2.Explain how long the process improvement project is expected to take.

3.Determine the budget for your process improvement project, based on the information provided in the scenario.

a.Explain the budget allocations.

Please provide your sources.

FCH Scenario Fielder Con'n'nunity Hospital Scenzu'io Fielder Community Hospital (FCH) has five campuses. Each campus is in a different geographical location: North (rural), South (suburban), Downtown (metropolitan/city center), Children's (metropolitan/city center), and Long-Term Acute Care (LTAC) (suburban). There are 227 physicians, physician assistants (PAS), and nurse practitioners (NPs) at FCH. Many of these individuals see patients at all five facilities. Each campus currently uses a hybrid medical record and stores paper records at each of their respective facilities. Health information management (HIM) staff are responsible for retrieving records from the floor of each facility and carrying them back to the facility's HIM department for indexing and scanning. FCH leadership has budgeted $4,000,000 to transition to a fully digital electronic health record (EHR). They have selected Synesthor EHR as the vendor. This allocation is only enough money to meet the requirements to remain compliant and does not cover the costs of investing in cutting-edge technology. The hospital will also be merging the HIM department from each campus into one centralized location. Currently, each of the five HIM departments has a director, with subdepartments to support release of information (ROI), coding, and deficiency tracking/data management duties. Departmental staffing has traditionally been structured per facility. Each department will be merged into one centralized location, under the leadership of one HIM system director. The new centralized space will hold 125 people (reference the Current HIM Staff table), with room for 10 percent growth. The number of employees is expected to increase with facility growth. The facilities with 35 or fewer employees move at a slower pace due to the patient volume and size of the facilities. The facilities with more than 50 employees are fast-paced and numbers-driven. Of the five facilities, only the South facility has great patient satisfaction scores. The Downtown facility is one of the larger facilities and has very low patient satisfaction scores. The other facilities have scores that need improvement. The South facility, that scores well, does not want to be associated with the poorly scoring and mediocre facilities. New leadership in FCH supports remote work for the coding and revenue cycle positions. Remote employees will need new laptops, telephones, and VPN access to the EHR. This will cost $2,100 per employee. In-house employees will need new desktop computers and telephones because the current equipment is outdated. This will cost $2,700 per employee. (See the operational budget.) The HIM system director, HIM managers, and HIM supervisors will be responsible for training the employees, and this training on the new EHR system will occur during work hours. In the current hybrid system, productivity fluctuations are due to patient volume. In the new system, productivity fluctuations are anticipated to be in intervals due to employees spending extra time training and because of the learning curve associated with operating in the new system. Some employees have been in the department for over 20 years and are not as technologically savvy as the newer employees, many of whom are recent graduates