Question

In many healthcare organizations, an interactive tool is usually incorporated to provide information that is captured electronically. These dashboards provide real-time data that help clinical and non-clinical managers to make informed decisions about patient care. Prior to beginning this discussion, review the Dashboards for Your Board: Communicating Data Effectively and Efficiently, Two Keys to Deliver Better Care and Measure: Pod Implementation & Dashboards, Utilizing Big Data to Provide Better Health at Lower Cost, and Intelligent and Actionable Dashboards articles. Additionally, review the following Saint Martins Clinic (Links to an external site.). sample dashboard and research a few more financial healthcare dashboards.

As a healthcare manager, you are required to evaluate the length of stay, volume or census, and payer mix, etc. to assess how well you are meeting the department goals. The dashboard examples provide snapshots of those components for managers to use for daily decision-making purposes. Explain to the Vice President of Operations via email two challenges to, as well as two opportunities to meet, the department’s goals based on one of the scenarios you select below.

• You are an inpatient service line director and your dashboard consists of Average Length of Stay (ALOS), re-admission rates, accounts receivable, timely submission of claims, pending charges waiting for the provider to hit the submit button, and credentialing updates on providers and managed care companies. Your goal is to keep the length of stay low, decrease re-admissions, ensure claims are paid timely and providers understand the relevance of timely submittal of charges.
• You are the practice administrator of a multi-specialty practice and your dashboard consists of patient cancellation appointments, no-show appointments, patients that arrived for appointments, pending referrals, completed referrals, daily claims submittal, and denial report. Your goal is to ensure patients are consistently coming in to be seen, reminding them of their appointments, verifying patient’s referrals are being used, and decrease claims being denied for payment.
• You are a hospice director and your dashboard consists of visit status (documentation of patients seen daily), claims on hold, intake list, discharged checklist, productivity, task list (what is due-recertification to continue visits, supervisory visits, and document tracking (orders missing). Your goal is to ensure patients are being seen daily by clinical staff, evaluate why claims are on hold, ensure more patients are being added than discharged weekly, and delegate assignments equally to staff.

Answer 1

Challenges patients cancelling the appointments in the last minute and therefore it becomes difficult to fill the vacant slots.

Another issue is the optimization of waiting time in case of referrers. If the doctor to whom the reference is made has no vacant slots immediately, there is a long buffer time and therefore patients might suffer due to this time gap.

Opportunities

To decrease claim denails the process of filling data can be automated so that human error can be reduced

When there is no show from patients are there are vacant slots, calls can be made to patients who have appotmemts on upcoming dates to ask if they want to prepone the appointment.