Case Study

Objectives

• Examine the AHIMA strategic plan and professional competencies to maintain relevancy as an HIM professional
• Develop a 5-year career development plan

Instructions

Complete an AHIMA professional inventory for an HIM professional and develop a career plan based on individual career needs. The AHIMA professional development inventory can be accessed via the link in figure 10.3 and the career plan template is provided as follows.

Scenario

Mary Beth Jones, RHIA, is an HIM director at a small rural community healthcare facility. She has been in the HIM field for approximately 15 years and realizes that even though her facility is pretty progressive for its size and location, she may not be keeping pace with the type of skills that are required for the future HIM workforce. Her husband may be transferred within the year to a more suburban city in another state that has a lot of opportunities for an HIM professional. Mary Beth is worried that she may not be as marketable as some of her peers. She has talked with one of the faculty members from where she attained her bachelor's degree and this individual recommended that Mary Beth use the AHIMA competency assessment tool to assess her gaps in her knowledge. The faculty member also suggested that Mary Beth consider attaining a master's degree in health informatics or HIM.

Mary Beth's current skill set is as follows:

• Her first position was as cancer registrar. She was a certified registrar for three years.
• Her second position was coding at a large physician practice for one and a half years.
• Her third position was the supervisor of the outpatient coding area, which included physician billing, outpatient surgery and observation coding, and all clinical coding. She was in this position for four years.
• She did not work for one and a half years after the birth of her third child.
• She was promoted to director of HIM five years ago. The projects she has completed include:
• While on the project team for implementation of an ambulatory EHR, she helped the design team with the build for the inpatient EHR that will go-live in six months
• She outsourced medical transcription
• She developed a coding workforce that works remotely
• She was an AHIMA-approved ICD-10 trainer and she performed, in conjunction with the coding manager, all the coding training in preparation for ICD-10
• She has not done much with reporting or data analytics and relies heavily on her data quality manager to run most of these reports
• Her healthcare organization has not embraced information governance

Assumptions

• Mary Beth is willing to do what it takes to get her learning on target with the HIM workforce.
• Mary Beth will be moving in the next year and she may need additional skills prior to obtaining another job as outlined by her career goals.
• Mary Beth wants to remain in management and she would like to be the assistant director or director at a large urban or suburban healthcare organization.

Deliverables

1. Create a five-year career plan for Mary Beth using the template provided. Include three strategic goals that Mary Beth should work on within her current facility to demonstrate relevancy in the HIM profession and for each of these strategic goals identify three operational goals similar to those in table 10.4.

2. Identify two internal forces impacting HIM (table 10.2) and provide two resources from the AHIMA Body of Knowledge that Mary Beth can consult to gain additional knowledge.

3. Identify two external forces impacting HIM (table 10.2) and provide two resources from the AHIMA Body of Knowledge that Mary Beth can consult to gain additional knowledge.

4. Create two personal goals for Mary Beth in regards to long-term career development.