Process Measurement Assignment

Overview: In this assignment I will give you a scenario and a flowchart which shows the steps in the admitting process at a hospital. There are problems with delayed admissions and your task will be to identify and measure those problems.

First you will need to be able to understand the concept of work as a process and you will need to be able to read the flowchart and analyze the information contained in this type of process illustration.

• If you haven’t read Chapter 3 on measurement, you will struggle with this assignment.
• If you haven’t read , you will need to read that now.
• If you haven’t read , do that now as well.

SCENARIO: You are the team leader for RGV Hospital Admitting Department. Over the last three months, you have noticed that the check-in process is taking longer than normal. Your department normally processes 400 patients a day. The patient check-in process should take 7 minutes or less, but currently the process averages 10 minutes. Approximately 40 percent of your patients are not registered within 7 minutes. The patient check-in process creates a patient backup at the registration desk. Patients and their families have expressed concerns about long wait time, and there is also patient feedback on the patient satisfaction survey about the check-in issues.

INSTRUCTIONS:

The information you need to answer the worksheet questions is provided in the scenario above and the flowchart below.

FLOWCHART:

Use the worksheet linked below to prepare this assignment, then submit it via the assignment link.

Read chapter 3 and refer to the lesson for linked reading, scenario and flowchart before attempting this assignment and refer to these materials as needed while completing this assignment.

1. Based on the flowchart and scenario provided in the lesson, identify two or more steps in the process that may be contributing to the overall delay of admissions. Classify each step you identify as structure, process or outcome related problems. See your text, chapter 3 for definitions and examples.

Your day job is team leader for RGV Hospital Admitting Department but you are taking online classes at UTRGV including HPRS 4302 and you decide to put what you are learning into action. As team leader for RGV Hospital Admitting Department, you want to plan a continuous quality improvement project to measure which of the identified problems is actually causing the delay. Given what you learned by reading chapter 3, given the information in the flowchart and scenario above and thinking of the process view of work, how could you measure the significance of one of the problems you identified in question 1 of this assignment?

2. Select one step that you classified as a process problem and describe how you will measure the effect this one step has on the total process delay. See chapter 3, (specifically, p. 60 in the 4th edition) for examples.

3. Write a complete formula that represents your description of a measurement in question 2 above. The formula should calculate how much this one step contributes to the overall delay in check-in time. (E=mc2, is an example of a complete formula.) Do not calculate overall delay, which was already given in the scenario. See chapter 3 for examples of measurement formulas.

4. Plug in numbers from the scenario and do the math. Explain the significance of your measurement. If the scenario does not include the necessary information, write your own extension to the scenario which includes the necessary data. Provide your scenario extension below (if needed) and use data from the scenario to calculate the formula you wrote in question 2.

Notes:

• Each student should have unique answers.
• You do not need to search the internet for a complicated formula; you just need to apply logic and basic math.

answer the following questions