Comp10 unit4c lecture_slides

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome to Health Care Workflow Process Improvement, Acquiring Clinical Process Knowledge, lecture c.
• #3: Objectives for this unit, Acquiring Clinical Process Knowledge, are to: Given a process observation scenario, formulate the questions that would facilitate a productive discussion of the workflow of information, activities and roles within that facility, Suggest ways to successfully respond to common challenges encountered in knowledge acquisition, and Given a practice scenario, choose an appropriate knowledge acquisition method.
• #4: Additional learning objectives for this unit, Acquiring Clinical Process Knowledge, are to: Given a process analysis scenario including list of observations, create an agenda for a visit closing meeting and an initial meeting report, and Given a set of diagrams and observations from an information gathering meeting, draft a summary report.
• #5: In lecture b, we covered common clinic processes and creating a process inventory. This lecture goes into more detail about what information should be obtained and documented for a process analysis including: Knowledge sources, Process information that should be considered in the analysis, Methods to obtain the information, Knowledge acquisition plan, and Initiating a relationship with a clinic.
• #6: For each process in your inventory, knowledge sources will need to be identified and consulted. These include:  process participants, the facility procedure manual which is applicable to each process, and information used or produced in the process.
• #7: Clinic leadership and staff that take part in a process at a healthcare facility are a main source of knowledge about the clinic processes. The process owner and individuals who perform the process are the most important. These are the individuals that you should observe or interview to acquire process knowledge. At a minimum, talk to the process owner, i.e., the individual ultimately responsible and accountable for the proper working of each process.
• #8: After these instructions, pause the slides. Read the scenario on the slide and make a list of the process participants. Indicate which individual or individuals you would interview or observe to gather information about the process. After you have finished, restart the slides and go on to the next slide, we will go over the results. Pause the slides now.
• #9: The process participants that are explicitly mentioned in the scenario include Patient Patty, Doctor Dan, and Receptionist Ronald. Receptionist Ronald is the primary user of the process because he performs actions in the process. Although Patient Patty is not a source of “organizational knowledge,” i.e., she has no knowledge of the clinic’s procedures for appointment scheduling, for example, what is supposed to happen, how long it should take, and regulatory or other constraints that may help form the clinic’s procedures, she interacts with the appointment scheduling process. Patient Patty, in human factors engineering would be called a secondary process user. In human factors secondary users are extremely important to understanding and redesigning an interface or workflow process. Only the patients calling in can tell you if they have trouble getting through, are put on hold for too long, are not called back if they leave a message, or can’t get appointments at a convenient or appropriate time. Further, clinic staff and providers may be unaware of patients’ experiences with the process. This is part of patient-centered care. Thus, patients should be interviewed about processes with which they interact. Doctor Dan may or may not have actual process knowledge and is likely to be very busy. However, as a secondary process user, his perspective and experience with the process is important. The doctor’s practice is affected by the appointment schedule. Receptionist Ronald, the primary process user should also be interviewed to acquire information about the process. Importantly, there must also be a process owner, someone who is responsible for the proper operation and management of the process. This is likely Receptionist Ronald’s manager. The process owner will be a knowledgeable source of information. Further, if this clinic is at a high CMM level, it will have documented procedures. Where documented procedures exist, they should be used. But remember that process owners and process documentation may be more a record of how the process is supposed to occur than a record of how it does occur. However, documentation can be used for a first draft and to increase the analyst’s familiarity with the process prior to interviews and observations to minimize the time required of clinic staff for interviews and observation.
• #10: In addition to identifying the people that you need to get information from, you will need to decide how, i.e., by what methodology you will obtain the information.  We will cover four main ways of obtaining process information from clinic providers and staff.  The four ways are: Observation – watching people do the process Process walkthrough (I call this structured observation) – a walkthrough means that you pretend you are the object of the process and you literally move through the organization as the object would.  For example, if it is appointment scheduling, you act as the patient (role play is ok) and go through the scheduling part.  When it comes to the steps performed by the receptionist, you go to her workstation and see what she does.  The point is that in a walkthrough, you experience the process.  The structure of you following the process helps ensure that nothing is left out.  This is personally my favorite. Because with interview methods, it is hard to ask the questions to elicit all the information you need, and it is easy to leave things out. Interviews include structured versus unstructured interviews, as well as interviews or interactions with groups versus individuals Reading documents. All of this means that you will need to ask questions.
• #11: A quote by Rudyard Kipling: “I keep six honest serving men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.” Poetry aside, questions are at the heart of knowledge acquisition. Although it might seem like the most important question is, “What questions should I ask?,” the More Informative Question for the analyst to ask is actually, “What do I need to know?”
• #12: The first questions you ask during your initial meeting with a clinic should concentrate on getting the list of core processes that a clinic performs, and which ones are:  Critical to patient care, High volume, and Could be greatly improved by Health IT. Think about what information you need to know to complete a one page diagram with the name of each of the clinic functions or services. This will come naturally if you take out a sheet of paper during the meeting and work on the diagram with the practice providers and staff.
• #13: After you have identified the important processes and expanded this list to include major process variations (this is discussed in detail in the Process Analysis Unit), you can turn attention to each process. For each process, the analyst needs to know: Who (what role) performs the process, What the steps of the process are, what exceptions occur, what information is needed for each step, When the process starts, Where the steps take place, and How each step of the process is performed and in what order things happen. A process walkthrough lets you experience this information, and questions come naturally when, at each step, you make sure you understand the who, what, when, where, how, and even why! In a walkthrough, you easily identify the process participants, this alerts the analyst to consider the perspective of each participant, for example, what the patient’s experience is in scheduling versus what the receptionist’s experience is.
• #14: Your initial meeting will often be with the practice manager or the individual charged with the EMR selection. This meeting can be short, 2-3 hours, depending on whether or not you add introductions with practice providers and staff. In this initial meeting, you can: 1. Complete your collection of the mission or vision, 2. Create a clinic context diagram, and 3. Start the process inventory. For visit 2, you will likely meet with more people, or at least interact with more people as you use process walkthrough or interviews to gather information. For visits 2 or more (depending on the practice size and number of processes), you will need: A list of processes to walkthrough, A list of process participants and the participant roles to observe and question, and A list of questions for each participant or participant role.
• #15: Initiating a relationship with the clinic is a very important step. Many clinics do not have experience with technology implementations and do not know what to expect. This also means that you need to use plain everyday language to explain the process, what you will do, what you need from the clinic, and what the clinic should expect. Your employer will likely have information prepared for clinics about what to expect. The following are things that can help your initial meetings with a clinic go well. Obtain from your employer a scope of work that you are expected to perform for or with representatives from the clinic. Go over this in detail with the primary clinic representative. You should not expect that he will communicate this information to everyone you will be meeting with. For this reason, when you meet new people from the clinic, it is helpful to have a brief 2-3 sentence “elevator speech” description of what you are doing and how they will be involved. At the first meeting, review your scope of work with the primary clinic representative. Decide what you will do, what you need for the clinic to do – i.e., set aside time for meetings, interruptions or a half-Saturday for process walkthroughs, and how long your work, the project, meetings, interruptions will take. Also, review what the clinic should expect with respect to its time commitment and what your deliverables are. Be sure to go over your knowledge acquisition plan. It is important to provide an agenda in advance of meetings – remember that your work will cause interruptions to the busy clinic schedule. Finally, use plain language. These documents need to be understood by all levels of staff in the healthcare facility.
• #16: It is important to anticipate and make plans for how you will deal with barriers that you encounter in the knowledge acquisition meetings. Common barriers include: Concern about change, Clinic time and resource constraints, Your time and resource constraints, and Lack of computer literacy. Concern about change is real and stems from things like fear of job loss, fear of not being “good” at new job responsibilities, fear of computers, fear of not having access to information that they have now in paper form . The inability to use a computer well limits access to information. These are real concerns. The way to overcome them is to involve clinic staff in your work and, with clinic leadership, provide them information about what changes to expect, and what training or other assistance is available. Clinic resource constraints are a large barrier. Your knowledge acquisition work will require time from clinic staff. Doing process walkthroughs may require staff to come in after hours. All of these things cost the clinic money or cause inconvenience for the clinic staff. In a busy clinic setting, these resources are scarce. Analyst resource constraints are also a barrier. Either the clinic is paying for your services, or your employer is funded by the government to provide services, or some combination of both. Either way, there will be more processes to acquire knowledge about and analyze than you have time for. To overcome this, work with the clinic to prioritize the processes that are analyzed in the allotted time. While you might think that lack of computer literacy will only be a factor after implementation of an EMR, think again. People with no computer experience will not be able to conceptualize how their workflow will be different with a computer. They will not have an experience base to alert you to process issues that might impact your analysis, and they may not understand some of what you say. When they do not understand, they will later be surprised, and surprises are not good.
• #17: After meeting with a clinic you will likely need to provide a report to document your work to date: The Knowledge Acquisition report should contain: Information about the meeting including dates, participants, along with processes documented on each date, Context diagram, Process inventory, and Process diagrams.
• #18: In lecture c, we have covered the following: Identifying process participants, Different methods of obtaining information, Creating questions for knowledge acquisition visits, Creating a knowledge acquisition plan, Initiating a relationship with a clinic, Barriers to knowledge acquisition, and Meeting Summary Report.
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