• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Tip: One-on-one training

Patient Access Weekly Advisor, March 12, 2008

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Patient Access Weekly Advisor!

Stephanie Smithson, CHAM, patient access manager at Dunn Memorial Hospital in Bedford, IN, had one question to answer when her facility implemented its accuracy registration program: How can we make it better?

"We'd always done it by department," says Smithson, whose critical access hospital is licensed for 25 inpatients. She manages 10 full-time employees for registration, two for centralized scheduling, and six for switchboard. She is also responsible for developing training for two clinics and four hospital-owned physician practices that use the hospital information and scheduling systems.

"So the problem with that," Smithson adds, "was that everybody would say, 'Well that's not me. I don't know who is making errors, but that's not me.' It didn't affect them. There was no accountability. There was no motivation to change."

Second, staff members did not get enough feedback. "I wanted to find a way to reward people who did a good job and to give people who were not doing a good job a tool to show them they weren't doing a good job," Smithson says.

When Dunn first implemented the individual accuracy rates, staff members still complained about errors-just not theirs. They questioned the manual approach in which they were tracked. And they talked about an imbalance; someone could have a high number of errors, but do more registration than anyone else.

So Smithson and her group took it a step further-they made the program part of access staff members' individual evaluations and took into consideration error percentage and volume of work. The scoring is straightforward: the fewer errors based on the volume of work, the higher the score.

"We took out any misunderstandings and made them realize it isn't about you or me personally," Smithson says. "It's 'This is your work.' It removed any questions from the evaluation process."

Staff members also need to know why they are being tracked-and it's not just for individual progress. Being off in registration affects the entire revenue cycle and, ultimately, their paychecks, Smithson says.

To read the full story on this topic, click here.

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Patient Access Weekly Advisor!

• Comment
• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive

Comments