information management

Implementation Committee Directions
Imagine
that you are Maria Stolze, RHIA, vice president of HIM at Parkview
Health in Fort Wayne, IN. Carefully read through the following
scenario:

Real-World Case

The following case is an excerpt from an article by Gina Rollins that appeared in the Journal of AHIMA, October 2007.

Many
large healthcare systems that have multiple hospitals and other
facilities over a broad geographical area have adopted complete HIM
centralization. One example is Parkview Health in Fort Wayne, IN. Maria
Stolze, RHIA, vice president of HIM, has direct responsibility for all
HIM functions at the system’s eight facilities. There are no HIM
directors at the local level.

Instead, two directors—of
HIM services and transcription, respectively—report to Stolze. Managers
and supervisors who report to the two directors have day-to-day
responsibility for HIM functions at Parkview hospitals. The supervisors
rotate between facilities, although at least two are dedicated to the
flagship Parkview Hospital because of its size. Depending on size, there
may be as few as three HIM personnel at individual facilities, as
coding and transcription are performed off-site.

Parkview
arrived at this model to improve quality and service and to decrease
cost, goals it has achieved, says Stolze. The approach also has been
critical to adopting uniform HIM policies and procedures. “I’m the
ultimate decision-maker. Even if we’re not all in agreement, that’s an
advantage of our model. Otherwise there might be conflicting policies
and procedures between the individual facilities. You need someone to
call it when there are different perspectives,” she says.

You
have been put in charge of forming an implementation committee to assist
in the selection process of a new Health Information System that is
going to be installed sometime in the next 24 months and need to submit
an over of your selection process. Answer the following questions
according to the scenario above to help complete your overview:

• What members are you going to select for this committee?
• How can you justify that the HIM staff in all of the facilities at Parkview Health are fairly represented?
• What type of members do you need to make sure that you include?
• Should there be members on this committee from outside of the HIM department?
• Why is this committee important and what duties will they perform?

The
overview should be about a page in length, in paragraph format,
grammatically correct, and it should include any references that were
used in APA 6th edition format.