The acting HIM Director at ABC Hospital is currently on maternity leave. You have been hired as a HIM consultant to assist with managing the department during her absence. Your first day at the facility the CFO phones and says the budge
1. Review the AHIMA article, "Release of Information Strategies to Maximize Customer Service"
2. Analyze current state of your Release of Information function. example:
1. Is the service outsourced or provided by your staff?
2. If the service is outsourced do you need other staff to act as a receptionist, pull charts, handle walk-ins?
3. What is the volume of requests?
4. Do you have the correct amount of staff to meet the turnaround time?
5. Is Release of Information completed with paper records or is your facility utilizing an electronic health record?
3. Create a Word document explaining your current state of the Release of Information function.
4. Create a Word document table that identifies the revenue and expenses that would be required in the Release of Information function within a hospital.
EXTRA INFO:
Hopes this helps, here is some more information about the written assignment for Week 7 which is titled - Resource Allocation Monitors: Charlee
You will be completing two parts for this assignment.
The first part is to talk about your Release of Information area within your department. This information is pretend, make believe or in other words numbers you make up. You will explain the following:
-Is your Release of Information function performed by your employees from within the department? Or have you perhaps hired an outside company to come in and perform Release of Information?
-If you have hired an outside company to do Release of Information for your facility how is that structured? Does the company do it all such as answering the phone calls for ROI? Does the company locate the charts within your facility they need to fulfill a request? Does the company's staff act as the receptionist for the release of Information function by greeting patients as they bring in their Authorizations for Release of Information?
-Or if you outsource your release of Information function by hiring an outside company does the company's staff just do the copying or printing of patient records and your staff answer the phones, greet the customers? Does your staff perhaps pull the charts (if you have paper based records) for the company's staff?
-How many requests come into your department each week or week month?
-No matter if you outsource the function or have your own HIM staff perform the ROI function do you feel you have enough staff? What is your turnaround time or time promised to customers for you to complete their requests for copies of patient information?
-Are you using a paper based or electronic health record at your facility?
The second part of the assignment is to create a table within a Word document stating the Release of Information expenses and revenues. Here are some things to think about for this portion:
-Revenue: The revenue you receive from the ROI function will be what you charge for making the copies of patient records. Remember it is legal to charge for copies:-) Think about if you are going to charge patients for copies for their records or will you just be charging attorneys and insurance companies for copies. The amount of revenue will be for the copies of records you chose to charge for at your facility.
-Expenses: Here you will have more items to list. Think about what you will need as far as staff and supplies to complete the Release of Information function. If you have a paper based health record you will need to consider costs for toner, a copy machine, and paper. Think about your mailing expenses. What are you paying your staff or the outside company to complete ROI? How many employees? What other expenses can you think of that you might have?