Quality Standards In Health Care

The hospital could improve the data quality by design primary models that gathered and organized key information. Make sure proper training and coordination of the system capabilities are enhance on all level of the organization chain. Make sure you have a backup system if the system seems to not be working properly or crash. Making sure the patient is overall satisfied and the providers are up to par with the technology and its usages. Make sure audits are done randomly and errors are eliminated. If any information is missing or incorrect information is update immediately.

Take part in courses to learn new skills to incorporate into day to day working.

Apply accurate, complete, and consistent coding practices for the production of high-quality of healthcare data.

Utilize health information professionals and practice to ensure compliance with health data structures, standards and content.

You are absolutely right. Consistency is always key when maintaining any standardized process. In fact, data consistency is one the essential characteristics of quality data listed in the AHIMA data quality model. As you mentioned earlier, having health care originations adhere to their own guidelines, in regard to data standards, could be problematic. Simply because, we cannot guarantee that data codes from one organization are going to be transcribed correctly by another health care facility that uses different codes and standards. But If health organizations conformed to one data standard we could greatly reduce transcribed error rates, thus promoting data consistency.

Healthcare has evolved over past decades and continues to remain an issue of concern for individuals everywhere. Effectively managing data is important to improving the performance in the health care system. Accumulating, evaluating, deciphering and acting on data for particular performance measures allow health professionals to identify shortcomings and make the necessary adjustment, and track the outcome.

The Director of HIM is expected to keep learning in these areas since the pace of improvement and change is expeditious. As a HIM professional he/she will need to work jointly with internal and external partners to fulfill interoperability and health information exchange agreements. Also to govern the development of standards to meet organizational needs, and engage in the development of standards to address local and national industry needs (LaTour, Eichenwald, and Oachs (2013). This is where health informatics begins to play a significant role for the Director of HIM; who will serve as a professional resource for the healthcare organization who can participate in the standards development task by examining proposed standards and recommending new ones. The HIM viewpoint in the domain of data standards has never been so appreciated.

 Maintenance of complete and accurate medical records for each patient as described in RC.01.01.01. This standard was also identified by JACHO as top compliance issue for the industry.

AHIMA recognizes that superior quality health care and clinical data are critical resources needed for effective healthcare, and works to assure that the health information used in care, research, and health management is valid, accurate, complete, trustworthy, and timely. This group is concerned about the effective management of health information from all sources and its application in all forms of healthcare and wellness preservation. Health issues, disease, and care quality also transcend across national borders. AHIMA’s professional interest is in the application of best health information management practices when and wherever they are needed. (The American Health Information Management Association, 2010).

It is important to understand as the years pass by and the time is changing, the world of healthcare is changing as well, especially in terms of healthcare reform. One major change in healthcare reform was a course of action that required healthcare organizations to submit mandatory data on the quality care of their patients. This plan was initiated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in 2015, in which they implemented the Medicare Access and CHIP Re-authorization Act (MACRA). This act modernized how Medicare payments are tied to quality and cost of care (EClinical, n.d.). MACRA initially focused on Meaningful Use (MU), PQRS and Valued-Based Modifiers (VBMs). In fact, when it came time to report quality data, if an organization did

Building Rapport - It provides an opportunity for individuals to develop and build on rapport with colleagues. The employee gets to know their colleagues intimately, at least in context of the business environment, whereby strengths and weaknesses are identified and worked on.

Health care systems are reporting and monitoring quality of care indicator data with increasing regularity.

There is an accentuation on the need for quality of coded data with the use of computer-assisted coding in healthcare organizations to assure compliance is being met with regards to the increasingly multifaceted quality reporting requirements.

The first quality initiative that could increase patient satisfaction and potentially reduce healthcare cost is the national data warehouse. According to Brennan, Cafarella, Kocot, McKethan, Morrison, Nguyen, Shepard & Williams II (2009), “this type of quality analysis needs to be valuable to both payers and consumers. For payers, quality analysis helps them potentially understand payment mechanisms, quality providers, regional differences and medical management techniques. For consumers, there is a better understanding of practice and potentially cost differences of providers. So, the primary purpose for creating a national data warehouse will be to develop key quality measures that all parties can agree on.” The second quality initiative that could increase patient satisfaction and potentially reduce healthcare cost is creating one common contract between all health plans and providers (Brennan et al., 2009). According to Brennan et al., (2009), “to accomplish this, a national group comprised of government personnel and knowledgeable provider contractors from the health plans will set national guidelines. Regional contracting groups will be entirely made up of current health plan contractors and will do the local contracting under

Quality measures are strategies that gauge, evaluate or compute health care processes, results, discernments, patient insight, and administrative structure. In addition, quality measures are frameworks that are connected with the capacity to deliver first-class health care and/or that are able to identify with one or more quality objectives for medicinal services. These objectives include: compelling, protected, effective, quiet focused, impartial, and opportune consideration. Quality measures can be used to measure quality improvement, public reporting, and pay-for-reporting programs specific for health care providers (CMS.gov, 2016). There are an assortment of quality measures in which health care organizations can use to determine the status of the care they are delivering. Many are appropriate, but few are chosen for this research paper. Among them are: National Health Care Surveys, Hospital IQR Programs, Scorecards, and Political, Power, and Perception/Data for Decision-making tools.