Class: Financial Management for Health Information Management Title: Performance and Productivity Standards and Monitoring in HIM Services Your HIM department is implementing an EHR system, which requ

Benchmarks

Posted on Oct 13, 2019 9:00:00 AM

Internal Benchmark - a measurement from within your facility, like last year's measurement, for example. "My inpatient coder is below the inpatient coding benchmark of 25 accounts per day that was established last year".

External Benchmark - a measurement from outside the facility, like another facility's measurement or one published in a book. "My inpatient coder is below the inpatient coding benchmark of 28 accounts per day that was provided to me by St Mary's Hospital in Ottawa but above the coding benchmark of 22 accounts per day that I located in an online article on coding overages".

Working with Operational Plans

Another way to say operational plan is to use the term "accountability summary." This includes the following:

Align performance management expectations
- By developing cross functional plans, members of the leadership team are able to monitor progress, engage when necessary, and follow organization development efforts.
Implement a system for managing accountability
- Sets goals and expectations around healthcare organizations' strategic goals. Holds leadership accountable for ongoing actions and attainment of goals. Can be utilized as a basis for leadership performance reviews.
Enforce discipline to stay focused on outcomes and not outputs
- Forces creation of process by which an organization becomes business dependent and whose new processes are not person dependent.

A typical work flow for an operational plan looks like the following image. There is more about operational plans below the image.

Class: Financial Management for Health Information Management Title: Performance and Productivity Standards and Monitoring in HIM Services Your HIM department is implementing an EHR system, which requ 1

Three areas of opportunity for improvement include:

Operations
Growth
People

When identifying areas for improvement, these three areas can assist in identifying opportunities such as automating processes that are manual, eliminating paper for computer file rooms, etc. There are many areas within a healthcare facility where improvements are needed. For example, the use of electronic payments versus paper checks for reimbursement can increase efficiency and productivity, as well as reduce some of the costs related to posting payments.

Value Proposition

Developing a value proposition can help in operational planning. Four strategies for creating a value proposition include:

Customer Service - How will customer service be affected?
Quality - How will the plan affect quality?
Credibility - How credible are the recommended improvements?
Solutions - Are the solutions long-term? Affordable?

Key points to consider in operational planning are:

Actions
1. Should be non-routine
2. Example action verbs - implement, develop, conduct, achieve, complete
3. Avoid these action verbs - inspect, review, consider, monitor, continue
Outcomes

1. Should be measurable
2. Specific
Review

1. Review new actions/outcomes with manager before adding to operations (ops) plan
2. Review ops plan with your team members so they understand the direction you wish to take your department
3. Review all ops plan to understand where you/team members are named as a resource and to understand the direction of the organization

The following image shows one possible way to develop an action/outcome as part of a value proposition:

Operational planning is the process of linking strategic goals and objectives to tactical goals and objectives. It describes milestones, conditions for success and explains how, or what portion of, a strategic plan will be put into operation during a given operational period. An operational plan is the basis for, and justification of an annual operating budget request. Therefore, a five-year strategic plan would typically require five operational plans funded by five operating budgets.

Operational plans should establish the activities and budgets for each part of the organization for the next 1 - 3 years. They link the strategic plan with the activities the organization will deliver and the resources required to deliver them.

An operational plan draws directly from program strategic plans to describe program missions and goals, program objectives, and program activities. Like a strategic plan, an operational plan addresses four questions:

Where are we now?
Where do we want to be?
How do we get there?
How do we measure our progress?

The operations plan is both the first and the last step in preparing an operating budget request. As the first step, the operations plan provides a plan for resource allocation; as the last step, the Operational plan may be modified to reflect policy decisions or financial changes made during the budget development process.