Hospital Benchmarking Interview

BENCHMARKING PRACTICES (INTERVIEW) I interviewed _________RHIA, CCS, who is the Manager of the Health Information Management Department at University Hospitals, Richmond Medical Center in Richmond Heights, Ohio. Mr. _______ was kind enough to give me an interview on benchmarking from a Health Information Management point of view. Mr._________ started by telling me that the Department Performance Improvement Plan is a plan intent to assist each department to continue to make quality a priority, and that Quality meant how well the hospital does things to help the patients' stay or visit at the hospital. Mr.________ stated the Health Information Management Department will monitor and evaluate the care and services provided within the department. The department provides care and service to it internal and external customers. The types of data that was being collected were analyze inpatient charts within 7 days of discharge, complete inpatient coding within 5 days of discharge, increase monthly impatient reimbursement through the concurrent data improvement program, regular department monitoring patient needs utilization review and risk management, delinquent charts, retrieval of charts number of request received and completed, delinquent data, concurrent data improvement. Mr._____ stated that budgeting
is also a big benchmarking and that the Health Information Management Department budget in always under their limited and is very detail. Mr.______ stated that the resources that were involved were log books, hospital information system, and verbally.
The tool that was being used for the internal comparison is running charts and using score cards that involve Cleveland Clinic against University Hospitals. There is no data comparing for any external database comparison group (national or regional). There was an improvement in analyze inpatient charts from January to October. There was a need for improvement for complete inpatient coding from January to October. There was an increase inpatient reimbursement through the concurrent data improvement program from January to
October. Mr.______ stated that she and other department heads of each medical center meet and bring all charts and compare and share data, and this is their benchmarking within University Hospitals. Mr.______ did not mention about informal benchmarking being done; but I feel it is done within the medical centers from employee to employee and department to department. Interview with Mr. ______ RHIA, CCS, Manager Health Information Management, University Hospitals Richmond Medical Center, conducted on October 13, 2011.