Case Study:
The Case of the Incomplete Charts
It is your first week as head of the Health Information Department. After having spent the week meeting and getting to know the staff in your department, you also had a chance to meet many of the staff and physicians of the hospital.
One of the initial concerns expressed to you by your boss, the Vice President of Information Services, is that the number of physicians' incomplete charts far exceeds the number of charts that should be incomplete, based on hospital policy. A complaint you hear over and over from physicians is that when they come to your department, they keep getting the same charts to complete and the Health Information Management employees don't always find all of their charts.
Before another week goes by, you feel something must be done to address these reoccurring complaints. You call an HIM department staff meeting with all of your employees and inform them of your concerns. Immediately there is an outbreak of "It's not our fault." Before this has a chance to escalate, you interrupt and inform your staff that this meeting is not to place blame, but to find out why these complaints keep occurring, and once that is discovered, to determine a way to eliminate or reduce this problem. You explain to the employee that you are going try using a technique called Brainstorming to allow everyone to express their thoughts on why these complaints might be happening.
For your written assignment, imagine that you are the head of the Health Information Department in "The Case of the Incomplete Charts" above. You have gathered the staff together to brainstorm explanations for the following statements:
The number of physicians' incomplete charts far exceeds the number of charts that should be incomplete.
Physicians are complaining that they are not given all the charts that they are required to complete when they come to the HIM department to complete their records.
In a Word document, write ten brainstorming ideas that you think your staff might provide to explain the two statements in bold above.
Your ideas can be presented as a list of items or a table of items. Remember, you and your staff are brainstorming possible reasons why the two bulleted items above are occurring; you are not coming up with final solutions. You are not required to come up with final solutions in this step of brainstorming because the purpose of this first step is to identify the issues or possible explanations. Brainstorm ideas are to be written as statements not questions.
Example: The patient has been readmitted and the chart is on the patient floor for patient care and cannot be given to the physician to complete in the HIM department
Some of the questions below might give you a prompt for a brainstorming idea.
- Why do physicians leave such a high percentage of the charts incomplete?
- Why do physicians think they keep getting the same charts?
- Why are physicians not getting all their incomplete charts?