In response to your peers, offer any advice and feedback to address your peers’ progress and concerns.

Post # 1

Jennifer

Wine 

For my project, I chose the topic; how is telemedicine increasing the efficiency in primary care for elderly men with chronic disease in rural areas? The resources needed for this program will be a telehealth program, technology, staffing and training for staff, financial, and partnerships. We will utilize our current staff; however, we will need to hire, externally or internally, a telehealth coordinator. 

The goal for the program is for telehealth to be an integral method of providing health care services to elderly men with chronic diseases in rural areas so they can stay put at home but still receive consistent quality care. Since the technology aspect for the initial startup of telehealth can be expensive and costs associated with it as well, research on grants will be conducted. Many grants have been made available to help with the purchase of such technology if you are able to secure one.

I do not have any concerns at this point, I am able to pull a lot of information from scholarly articles thus far.

Thank you,

Jennifer

Post #2 

Barbara Brash 

Through research conducted in this course I propose to answer the question, how does clinical documentation improvement impact risk, quality, and reimbursement in the hospital setting? The importance of accurate and complete documentation is drilled into every clinical discipline from day one, and never ends. That focus tends to be on risk. However, as the industry continues to move away from fee-for-service and the rate of full-scale audits rapidly increases, the impact of documentation on reimbursement has become a stark reality. Therefore, the return on investment for clinical documentation improvement/integrity (CDI) programs is much more easily recognized, making it less challenging for program managers to garner support from stakeholders (Haas, 2013). 

The human resources required for a successful CDI program include a program manager, clinical documentation specialists (CDS), coders, health information management (HIM) professionals, physician advisor (PA), business/data analysts (BA), and information technology (IT) specialists. Financial resources for continued education and training are imperative, as industry accepted diagnosis and procedure codes, standard definitions, and correlating documentation requirements are revised routinely. The most vital, and complex, resource required for CDI program effectiveness and sustainability is the software platform. This is especially significant to my research as we just completed a full scale, organization wide software transition….yes, we did this during a pandemic. This  has drastically impacted the accuracy and timeliness of our clinical documentation. As we work through the problems, provide ongoing support internally and to providers, and make corrections associated with this transition, we are much less productive in our standard daily work. Our billing has also been delayed, which has resulted in less cash on hand than projected in the budget. As my organization struggles with the effects of the pandemic and the new software platform, my major concern is appropriately problem solving, educating, creating new workflows, and efficiently releasing bills with less resources. Reviewing current roles and associated activities, and collaborating with program managers/participants in other areas to optimize our combined resources and achieve performance goals is the priority.

References

Haas, D. (2013, February). Clinical documentation improvement: what executives need to know and the financial impact of neglect. Becker’s Healthcare.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/clinical-documentation-improvement-what-executives-need-to-know-and-the-financial-impact-of-neglect.html