Question

CASE 7-3: Productivity Study

Your inpatient coders are always behind. The supervisor has asked for more staff and the HIM director agrees with the request. When the director submitted her request to administration, the vice president asked her to conduct a productivity study of the local hospitals. She called 4 hospitals, and her findings are shown in Table 7-1. The director knows that if she shows this data to the vice president, not only will she not get the positions she requested, but she will also be asked to increase her productivity. She can see that she needs to do some more research. You know that the coders at your facility code the charts and also abstract quality indicators. Your research shows that at the other hospitals, the quality indicators are abstracted by staff in the Quality Management Department.

Table 7-1: Productivity Study of Local Hospitals

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	Our hospital	Hospital A	Hospital B	Hospital C	Hospital D
Inpatient charts per day	15	20	22	23	21

1. Do you need any additional information?

2. If so, where would you go to get the information?

3. What arguments can you use to support your request for the additional staff?

Answer 1

1. Do you need any additional information?

• Yes, the additional information required is as follows:

1. The standard operating procedure of the inpatient coders in the other hospitals.
2. Details of what is the exact job profile and job process of the inpatient coders in other hospitals.
3. The time is taken for one inpatient coder to enter the data and amount of data compared to the time taken for inpatient coder of another hospital to enter the data and the amount of data they are required to enter.

2. If so where would you get the information?

• This information will be available from the HR department of these hospitals. You can request the other hospitals to share the standard operating systems of the inpatient coders in their hospitals. Also, the statistics and measurability of the inpatient coders data in other hospitals can be requested from their HR department.

3.What arguments can you use to support your request for additional staff?

• We would argue with the following parameter:

1. The task done by our inpatient coders is much more compared to other hospitals inpatient coders.
2. The data entered by our inpatient coders are more and extensive compared to data entered by other hospitals inpatient coders.
3. The coders at our facility code the charts and abstract quality indicators, whereas in another hospital the quality indicators are abstracted by the staff in the quality management department.