November 18th, 2021 
Two pages
Competency 1: Explain strategies for managing human and financial resources to promote organizational health.
Explain organizational resources, including a financial budget, needed for the plan to be a success and the impacts on those resources if nothing is done, related to the improvements sought by the plan.
Competency 2: Explain how interdisciplinary collaboration can be used to achieve desired patient and systems outcomes.
Describe an objective and predictions for an evidence-based interdisciplinary plan to achieve a specific objective related to improving patient or organizational outcomes.
Explain the collaboration needed by an interdisciplinary team to improve the likelihood of achieving the plans objective. Include best practices of interdisciplinary collaboration from the literature.
Competency 4: Explain how change management theories and leadership strategies can enable interdisciplinary teams to achieve specific organizational goals.
Explain a change theory and a leadership strategy, supported by relevant evidence, that are most likely to help an interdisciplinary team succeed in collaborating and implementing, or creating buy-in for, the project plan.
Describe an objective and predictions for an evidence-based interdisciplinary plan to achieve a specific goal related to improving patient or organizational outcomes.
Explain a change theory and a leadership strategy, supported by relevant evidence, that is most likely to help an interdisciplinary team succeed in collaborating and implementing, or creating buy-in for, the project plan.
Explain the collaboration needed by an interdisciplinary team to improve the likelihood of achieving the plans objective. Include best practices of interdisciplinary collaboration from the literature.
Explain organizational resources, including a financial budget, needed for the plan to succeed and the impacts on those resources if the improvements described in the plan are not made.
For this assessment, use the context of the organization where you conducted your interview to develop a viable plan for an interdisciplinary team to address the issue you identified. Define a specific patient or organizational outcome or objective based on the information gathered in your interview.
The goal of this assessment is to clearly lay out the improvement objective for your planned interdisciplinary intervention of the issue you identified. Additionally, be sure to further build on the leadership, change, and collaboration research you completed in the previous assessment. Look for specific, real-world ways in which those strategies and best practices could be applied to encourage buy-in for the plan or facilitate the implementation of the plan for the best possible outcome.
Sample paper
Scheduling in an outpatient oncology clinic is a complex task which involves maximizing productivity with patient satisfaction. The goal of a scheduling system is to match available resources with demands in order to decrease patient wait times. To implement an effective appointment system an interdisciplinary approach must be utilized. Change processes and leadership strategies play an essential role in developing an effective system. Leadership plays an important part in sustaining any operational changes regarding scheduling. A properly designed system has the potential to increase patient satisfaction by reducing patient wait times while subsequently increasing utilization of medical staff and resources. Objective To create a system for scheduling patients in the outpatient setting, a model would need to be developed that would provide parameters for chemotherapy treatments as well as limit the amount of longer duration treatments being scheduled simultaneously. This would create a more continuous workflow, therefore increasing resource utilization and minimizing patient wait times. Having a designated scheduler for all chemotherapy treatments would provide a more consistent and reliable means of scheduling while adhering to the scheduling template. This would simultaneously improve quality of care as the physicians coordinators would be able to devote their time to accurately obtaining patient information and providing patient care. This objective is aligned with the goal of increasing organizational workflow and patient satisfaction. Questions and Predictions 1. How much time should be allotted for each chemotherapy treatment? a. There is a high variability in treatment durations. Defining the duration of treatments would require identifying an estimate of the amount of time the treatment would likely take. Taking into account triaging, lab work, premedications and chemotherapy duration in order to define a standard amount of time that should be allotted. Allotting additional time for new patients to be provided education should be considered. (Millhiser, Veral 2018) 2. How many patients should be scheduled daily? a. The number of patients that can be scheduled daily will vary depending on the treatments being provided. Because treatments range in duration from 15 mins to 10 hours it is unknown how many patients can be seen on a given day. If treatment chairs are taken for longer periods of time then they are unable to be turned over for new patients. Identifying a system that allows for a specific number of longer duration treatments will optimize scheduling for other treatments and provide more consistency in daily census. (Liang, Turkan 2016) 3. How many nurses need to be scheduled to provide patient care? b. Scheduling of nurses will also vary daily as the number of patients wont consistently remain the same. Staffing will be a variable that must be adjusted based on patient needs and acuity. 4. How will a scheduling template be an effective tool? c. A scheduling template would need to be created, with an interdisciplinary approach from IT, nursing staff, and leadership. This template would provide a basis for daily scheduling of patients. It would define specific treatment duration times based on chemotherapy variability, as well as provide the foundation for delivery of quality patient care. 5. How will the scheduler know to schedule a patient and for how long? a. The scheduler will have a template that defines how long each treatment should last (adjusting 1 hour for teaching for new patients). This will define the amount of time the patient should be placed on the schedule in a treatment chair. The scheduler should be called or emailed by the physicians coordinator for them to schedule patients for their treatment. A specific group of chairs should be allotted daily for the longer duration treatments so that when those chairs are taken, no other long treatments can be scheduled that day. Change Theories and Leadership Strategies The proposed strategy of developing a model for the scheduling of our outpatient chemotherapy patients would increase the quality and quantity of care delivered to the patients. In my research, evidence was found that would support the change process discussed. In the article, Developing an efficient scheduling template of a chemotherapy unit: A case study, an analysis was conducted to improve the delivery of patient care provided in an outpatient oncology treatment facility. The goal of this research was to improve the patients wait times while also increasing the number of patients that could be treated daily. Several models were tested for efficiency of resource utilization, and the chosen one demonstrated 77% utilization, while also increasing the quantity of patients that could be treated daily by 22%. This study further supports my proposal of developing a scheduling template for our unit. Leadership plays an important role in any organizational change. Strategies for leadership must include promoting and encouraging change that is relative to evidence-based practice. Effective managers must demonstrate an active role in the change process for it to be embraced by staff. Leaders can foster change and implement strategies that are essential to health promotion by developing a culture that readily adapts to changes. In my research, I was able to find evidence that supports the leadership strategy of training that would be the most beneficial in adopting our scheduling model. Having competent leaders who are abreast to scheduling will play a significant role in implementation of our model. In the article Training in Implementation Practice Leadership (TRIPLE): evaluation of a novel practice change strategy in behavioral health organizations, leaders who were adequately trained were able to effectively identify, execute, and sustain change improvements relative to evidence at the organizational level. This is relative to our proposal because training the staff and management for patient scheduling changes will play a significant role in the success of our solution. Team Collaboration Strategy Interdisciplinary team collaboration is an essential component in the implementation and success of the new scheduling model. Process changes related to scheduling would need to be reviewed by the informatics committee, and they should be included in development of the software that is required to implement this change. The IT department would play a significant role in developing the software with the input from the informatics team. Once the template was created and tested by simulation, training would need to be executed. Extensive training should be done with members of the informatics committee and leadership on the unit. The informatics representative from the floor would serve as the super-user for the unit and would be able to assist in any training efforts with other staff. Having a specific group that is tasked with scheduling will decrease the workload on the patient care coordinators and free their time up for them to perform other patient care related tasks. Researching this topic, I was able to locate articles that could be referenced to demonstrate the importance and roles of developing an interdisciplinary approach to change. (Pawlowski, Wringe, Schmidt, Wagner…2017) The scheduling model would serve to increase utilization of available resources including staff. This would also benefit multiple disciplines in the outpatient oncology clinic. (Mazaheri, Abadi, Tabesh2018) Laboratory staff, pharmacy, and nursing staff would no longer be burdened with the influx of large numbers of patients at one time, and then idle times without any patients. The scheduling template would increase organizational workflow and productivity, while subsequently increasing patient satisfaction and wait times. Required Organizational Resources For this plan to be effective, several resources will need to be utilized. The informatics committee and IT will be tasked with developing the software that is needed to implement this change. This is part of their job description and will not require any additional costs. If a new program were to be developed or purchased a yearly fee would likely apply. When researching it was noted that scheduling software ranges in price but the median range was $3000 a year. I was able to inquire that when a software system is purchased training personnel are provided to help with the transition and are included in the yearly cost. Hiring a designated scheduler for our unit would be a substantial cost, the median hourly wage of a scheduler would be $18/hr., roughly estimated to be $37,500 a year. The only equipment that would be needed would be computers which the unit is already equipped with so no additional would need to be purchased. The suggested budget for the entire proposal would be $40,500. Although the cost of this change process amounts to a sizable number the benefits are significant. If the scheduling template is as successful as the one mentioned prior, 22% more patients can be treated daily thus increasing the revenue by at least as much. This will account for the budget that is required to implement this proposal as well as increasing profits. Failure to implement a scheduling system for our oncology unit could have severe impacts on the organizational workflow of the staff, patient satisfaction, and budget. Without a more structured and detailed scheduling system patients will continue to experience longer wait times, which decreases Press-Ganey scores and satisfaction. Longer wait times also decreased the quantity of patients that can be scheduled daily, thus impacting the revenue of the unit. Organizational workflow is disrupted and staff utilization will continue to decline. The budget will also be affected by staff overtime, which will continue to rise with inconsistent patient scheduling. Implementing this proposal serves to eliminate these issues, and potentially maximize productivity
Posted in 