Southern Coos Hospital and Health Center is a healthcare provider with 21 licensed beds and is a small, rural hospital owned and operated by the Southern Coos Health District.
"As a small, rural hospital, filling management roles can be a challenge. JTS’ interim management offering allowed us access to a highly skilled, professional HIM manager who worked closely with our team to initiate departmental process improvements. We are extremely happy with our partnership with JTS."
Chief Information Officer
The Challenge
Southern Coos Hospital & Health Center (SCH) engaged with the JTS Health
Partners (JTS) team to provide advisory services within Health Information
Management (HIM) to:
- Develop short-term and long-term process improvement and implementation recommendations
- Provide virtual interim HIM management services
- Design and implement an assessment of business continuity, information integrity and risk management plans through an HIM sustainability roadmap
- Review current state HIM and Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) documentation and operational metrics
The Collaborative Approach
Both organizations successfully instituted HIM departmental policies and workflow procedures. Additionally, developed HIM departmenal metrics regarding chart reviews, to measure the timeliness of key reports, involving the medical record including: H&P reports, H&P updates, immediate op notes, operative notes, discharge summaries and delinquency rates were established.
The Accomplishments
- Provided interim HIM leadership and guidance
- Developed a successful suspension process
- Conducted an audit to identify compliance regarding the timing of discharges
- Implementated a new release of information (ROI) service with HIPAA guidance
- Guided the client’s EHR vendor to ensure complete chart inclusion
- Recommended improvements on hospital consent forms
- Incorporated process improvements on chart completion and suspension process
- Improved fax process and provided staff education
- Improved coder query process