Improve staff education using this training outline
Provider billing errors could make hospital liable
However HIM professionals plan to train staff, there are some basic strategies and an outline that will better organize the training plans.
Claire Dixon-Lee, PhD, RHIA, president of MC Strategies Inc./WebInservice of Atlanta offers these guidelines for creating an effective and efficient training and educational program:
1. Determine specific training objectives.
Decide who your educational audience will be, what you will teach, when this training will take place, and how you’ll present the necessary information, Dixon-Lee suggests.
"Be very specific and consider the competing needs for particular training and education," she says. "You may be focused on coding training, but there also may be a compliance officer or information technician who wants to train people on new systems. So be clear on your objectives."
2. Synchronize training.
"Essentially, once you prioritize your needs and objectives, you have to identify who the learners are going to be, and it’s important to synchronize training within the daily workflow, looking at costs and benefits," Dixon-Lee advises.
For instance, what does it mean to the department if certain groups of people are taken away from the work environment to be trained in a separate place?
If this could have a negative impact on daily work objectives and productivity, then it might be wiser to synchronize education within the daily work flow, offering time for educational updates within 15-minute or 30-minute time slots, Dixon-Lee says.
Another strategy could be to encourage staff to educate themselves through reading outside of the daily work schedule, which may work depending on the HIM department’s delivery method.
3. Assess the educational delivery method.
HIM directors need to decide which educational delivery method would work best for their staff and department.
For example, the HIM department might have language and cultural differences to contend with, or a department’s staff may be poorly motivated to learn new ideas and information.
"We see a lot of people start out with great ideas to deliver training, but there might be no way to motivate people to do it," Dixon-Lee says. "You could mandate the training, or you could offer bonus plans or some other method such as a competition or game."
Consider whether the training is necessary for continuing education or to meet regulations or corporate requirements. In these cases, it may be appropriate to simply mandate the education and expect employees to comply.
Or, perhaps the HIM director would prefer to entice staff to participate in learning by offering incentives for completing the educational requirements.
"Within our company, we have a corporate compliance plan. Every year we’ve required that staff review the corporate compliance plan, which we put into web-based lessons," Dixon-Lee says. "We give out little prizes, dividing people into teams that compete with one another."
These small teams, which also can be called learning leagues, are told that if they complete their lessons within the designated time, they can win gift certificates to restaurants or other awards.
The advantage of tying prizes to team participation is that it takes advantage of peer pressure in which members of a team will push a slower or less-motivated member to finish the work so that everyone might win the award, Dixon-Lee says.
"I’ve seen that done in HIM departments with coders, where they’re given little prizes or points to purchase something in a gift shop," she adds.
"When you ask someone to do something on personal time, you really have to motivate them," Dixon-Lee notes. "But even in the HIM department, where there are productivity standards, you have to motivate staff to learn new information and keep up their productivity."
Educational competition can make learning fun and improve staffs’ attitudes toward mandatory training, as well, Dixon-Lee says.
Track improvements in accuracy rate
4. Keep guidelines for learning interventions.
"Keep track of who’s learning and keep records," Dixon-Lee says. "You can take that further and also look at improvements in staff’s actual work, when the education is job-related."
With coding, this strategy is easy because supervisors can quickly find out if the coding accuracy rate has improved.
"With issues like privacy and patient confidentiality, you can see if there have been any reported breaches or errors," Dixon-Lee says.
It’s also a good idea to give employees feedback from the record on a regular basis because this may give them some satisfaction in their efforts to learn new information or skills, or it might help them improve on their weak areas.
Some HIM departments might want to tie these records to an employee’s annual review, but that isn’t necessary, Dixon-Lee says.
"If it was an objective listed as something the individual would accomplish in the next year, like a new credential or a promotion that requires additional learning, then you would want to measure to see if they’ve accomplished that as a work-related objective," Dixon-Lee notes. "But I’d tread carefully on that, because sometimes learning is just part of the basic job."
Employees should expect that lifetime learning is their responsibility, and this is especially true in coding, Dixon-Lee says.
HIM professionals need to learn all of the new regulatory information as it is distributed, and they should value this education, she adds.
5. Identify the learner’s benefits.
"Learners have to realize that there are potential benefits for them and it’s not just something they are being made to do," Dixon-Lee says.
"Clarify your expectations if you are leading the training, and make it clear if the lesson requires a passing score," she adds.
For example, some HIM departments might expect to see an overall increase in staff productivity and coding accuracy, but choose not to use this information for individual evaluation or to take disciplinary action when an employee doesn’t meet the objectives after training, Dixon-Lee says.
On the other hand, training may have objectives that require the student to demonstrate what has been learned in some tangible way. If this type of assessment is going to take place, then the educator needs to let students know this from the start.
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