| Hospitals face increasingly stringent scrutiny of the claims submitted to payers, continuing reductions in reimbursement rates, and ever more complexity in reimbursement programs. The impact on hospitals' internal operations requires department level directors and managers to be more effective and cost-conscious than ever before. But to rise to this occasion, Health Information Management (HIM) professionals must have access to and base their management decisions on sound data from departmental operations. Unfortunately, there are few tools available to them among established hospital information systems, so, they must create their own. The product of this final applied project provides a guide to creating such tools utilizing Microsoft Excel. It introduces the HIM professional to techniques for using Excel's built-in functions, worksheet formatting, and limited programming in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), to create applications utilizing advanced quantitative measures to track and analyze day-to-day operational data, and to produce data on which to base sound management decisions. |
