Discussion: Identifying PI Opportunities

1515 unread replies.1515 replies.

You are presented with the following mini-scenarios:

1. Community Hospital’s HIM department does not have enough space and has set up all coders to work from home. Now, when coders have questions about a case, need to e-mail each-other rather than discussing it in person, often leads to miscommunication and inconsistencies in coding.
2. Dr. Smith enters new medications in the e-Prescribing system, asks the patient to confirm the preferred pharmacy and, and advises the patient that the medications will be ready for pick up in a few minutes.
3. Recently, the HIM department decided to use offsite storage for some of the older records. Ana works only on the weekends and is not aware of this change. As per ER request, she is looking for a patient record and cannot find it. 
4. When a patient with suspected pneumonia is admitted, it is expected that blood cultures and a chest X-Ray are done right away. This assures quicker and more accurate diagnosis or confirmation of diagnosis.

 (1) identify the performance improvement opportunity; (2) determine whether the issue is mostly related to a structure or process aspect or the interaction between the two; (3) explain the performance measure you would focus on along with the data you would collect; and (4) any benchmarks you would follow.