Academic Integrity: tutoring, explanations, and feedback — we don’t complete graded work or submit on a student’s behalf.

Develop a schedule for a healthcare website redesign project. Where the scope of

ID: 3008159 • Letter: D

Question

Develop a schedule for a healthcare website redesign project. Where the scope of the project is to create a new portal for an enhanced healthcare management system that would be available to all Doctors when treating a resident of the current state of practice. This software will make a person medical record readily assessable to all Medical Doctors with a current and valid NPI (National Practitioner .

Data to include:

• Phases and Activities/Tasks/Work Packages

• Key milestones • Names and descriptions for defined activities

• Start and End Dates

• Assigned Resources

• Duration in days

• Effort (in Microsoft Project, this is called Work) in hours In defining resources, include a total for all work assigned to each resource in hours and a total cost for each resource. Aggregated costs:

• Materials (if used)

• Staff

• Facilities (if appropriate) In assessing the final project, you will be expected to include the following:

• Decomposition of project work into Phases and Activities

• Tasks that are linked using predecessor/successor dependencies

• Balanced resources -- no one resource is carrying the whole project or constraining the schedule

• Effort, resources, and duration defined for every defined lowest-level task has. In addition, consider the effect on the project of adjusting the schedule to deal with the status problems you selected for the assignment in Module 6. Provide a paragraph describing the tactics you would use to revise or crash the project schedule to respond to each problem, and include an assessment of the overall impact on the project and its completion date. Include an additional paragraph discussing at least one possible idea for shortening the project duration, with an assessment of how much earlier you might be able to complete the work and what the overall costs and other consequences would be to the project.

Explanation / Answer

The delivery of health care has been quantified with the model, "structure + process = outcome."14 Present measurement systems may focus on any one of the components. "Structure" in health care delivery can refer to the physical plant or the organizational structure such as in credentialing. The Joint Commission for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), despite the recent emphasis on performance improvement, is an example of an association examining structure. 15 "Processes" are specific patient interventions performed by health care professionals and resulting in an outcome. Some examples of processes are childhood immunization, use and timing of thrombolytic agents in acute myocardial infarction (AMI), mammography, and patient length of stay in the emergency department. "Outcomes" are the result of the patient's interaction with health care professionals. Examples of clinical outcome measures include mortality or length of stay associated with medical diagnoses or surgical procedures, readmission rates, morbidity measures such as stroke after carotid endarterectomy, and unplanned return to the ED. The use of this model for defining health care delivery allows a common lexicon when discussing performance measurement. However, even with these definitions, confusion can arise between what is a process measure and what is an outcome measure. A cardiologist may view a cardiac catheterization as a diagnostic process while a health care insurer may view the same event as a cost outcome.

Process measures

Process measures are frequently used in performance measurement. Process measures are generally much easier to construct, require less data collection and analysis to produce, and are easier for both clinicians and non-clinicians to understand. Many performance measurement systems, such as the Health Plan Employer Data Information Set (HEDIS), are primarily measures of process of care. 5 Process improvement, when linked to processes proven by randomized clinical trials to improve outcomes, is an important part of continuous quality improvement (CQI). Implementation of CQI programs based on process improvement can reduce variation and enhance patient care. 16 An example of process improvement is the present effort by many EDs across the country to maximize the percentage of AMI patients receiving thrombolytic agents and to reduce the time to administration of these agents.

Although the development of process measures is generally easier than the development of outcome measures, certain steps must be followed to ensure the clinical pertinence and precision of each process measure. Important steps in the development of process measures include identification of the process of interest, review of the evidence supporting the process, development of a process indicator (including eligibility in the numerator and denominator), development of a standardized data collection system, and generation of the process indicator. 1