Information Manager at Mercy Vale Medical Center DQ

Overview: You are settling into your new position as a Health Information Manager at Mercy Vale Medical Center by now, but just as you are beginning to feel confident about your responsibilities, things change. Medicare has just implemented a new regulation that requires a new data point to be transmitted with each patient record. The good news is that the data point is in your information system, but your vendor does not currently provide the ability to transmit it; the vendor will have to change the program to allow for that.

Prompt: Write this paper as a memo to your supervisor, the HIM director, demonstrating that you have an excellent grasp of the problem and the steps you now need to take to address it. In your paper, be sure to include the following: Statement of the problem: What exactly is the problem? Clarification of role: What will your role be in this change? Statement of concerns: What concerns do you have about submitting the required information to Medicare while your vendor is making the changes? List of questions: What questions will you ask Medicare (CMS) and your vendor? Plan for testing: How will you test the conversion when your vendor has completed it?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument