Healthcare Improvement tools

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 respond to you defensively. They tell you that the HIM staff won’t answer the phone and that 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 no additional help. They also complain that the receptionist’s transfer 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 tasks to alleviate the situation because their days are already chaotic.

What improvement tool would you use to identify all possible reasons for the increase in complaints about the HIM department? Why?

What improvement tool would you use to gather data to confirm the reasons for the complaints about the HIM department? Why?

You hypothesize that complaints spike on certain days of the week. What improvement tool would you use to analyze this theory?

CITE AND MUST USE THE BOOK AND USE IN-TEXT CITATION

BOOK: Spath P.L., (2018) Introduction to Healthcare Quality Management, ED 3. Health Administration Press. ISBN-13 : 978-1567939859

ANSWER

Healthcare Improvement Tools

The improvement tool I would use to identify all possible reasons that have led to all the complaints about the HIM department is the five whys tool. The five whys tool is effective because it looks at the root cause of the problem (Key, 2019). The tool requires asking the question why the problem occurred in order to start solving it. In this case, asking why there are so many complaints about the HIM department will be the beginning of understanding the cause of the problems and the complaints in the hospital. It will also help solve the problem from the root, and in doing so, there will never be a repeat.

The tool that is most appropriate to gather information on the reasons for the complaints is the survey tool. The most appropriate survey tools in the department are questionnaires and interviews with the different departments (Amelung, 2019). This will help understand the issues from the employees in the HIM department. This can also be a platform to develop solutions and get suggestions from the hospital employees. This gives them a chance to participate in the process of making things better in the hospital and thus creating a healthy working environment.

I would use a bar graph-like tool to analyze the hypothesis that complaints are more on certain days of the week than others (Spath, 2018). The graph will enable the recording of the data collected on the complaints. It will also keep track of the days that the complaints are more than the others. The bar graph will tell the days when there were the least complaints and when they were the most. This tool will also help find the cause of complaints on the days when they were most.

References

Amelung, V. E. (2019). Healthcare management. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Key, B. A. (2019). Five Whys Root Cause System Effectiveness: A Two Factor Quantitative Review.

Spath P.L., (2018). Introduction to Healthcare Quality Management, ED 3. Health Administration Press. ISBN-13 : 978-1567939859.