D256 Task 2 Management Functions Plan Example

Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling Toward Three HIM Goals: A Management and Communication Plan for a Consolidated Health Information Department

Student Name

Leavitt School of Health, Western Governors University

D256: Principles of Management in Health Information Management, Task 2

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling Toward Three HIM Goals: A Management and Communication Plan for a Consolidated Health Information Department

The Department's Strategic Goals

Northfield Health's consolidated health information management (HIM) department, formed from three hospital departments and now largely remote, has three strategic goals for its first year. The first is coding accuracy of at least 95% on quarterly external audits at every hospital, up from a current range of 89% to 94%. The second is to cut the delinquency rate, the share of a typical month's discharges whose records are overdue, from 34% today to under 20%. The third is a turnaround of no more than five business days for each release of information request, compared with a current average of nine. This paper explains how the four functions of management would move the department toward each goal and sets out the communication strategies the director would use.

Planning

Planning sets objectives, identifies the tasks needed to reach them and allocates resources (Robbins & Coulter, 2021). For coding accuracy, the plan sets quarterly milestones of 92%, 93.5% and 95%, schedules training on the new single set of coding guidelines in the first 60 days and budgets for an external audit firm to review 30 records per coder each quarter. For record completion, the plan sets a monthly target that falls in steps from 34% to 20%, and assigns the project to the record completion team lead with support from the medical staff office. For release of information, the plan budgets for one request tracking system across all three hospitals and sets an interim target of seven business days by the sixth month. Each plan includes the resources required, the person responsible and the date by which progress will be reviewed.

Organizing

Organizing arranges people, work and authority to carry out the plan. The biggest organizing decision is to structure the department by function rather than by former hospital. Coders from all three sites will work in one inpatient team and one outpatient team, each led by a coding team lead, so that everyone follows the same guidelines and the same audit process. Record completion analysts will work one shared electronic deficiency queue organized by physician rather than by hospital, so that each physician hears from one analyst. Release of information specialists will work one request queue, assigned by request type, with one specialist handling urgent continuity-of-care requests each day. Team leads will each supervise no more than 12 staff, which keeps the span of control manageable for remote supervision. Clear lines of authority also matter to physicians: the director will agree with the chief medical officer who escalates delinquent records and when.

Leading

Leading is the function of motivating people and directing their work toward the goals. For this department, leading means helping staff accept the move from three familiar teams to one. The director will hold monthly all-staff video meetings to report progress on the three goals, recognize individuals and teams by name when milestones are met and meet one-on-one with each team lead every week. For the coding goal, leading means presenting audits as a way to help coders improve rather than a threat. For the record completion goal, it means working with physicians as partners. Physicians often experience documentation requests as disruptive, and in a study at a safety-net academic medical center, many physicians said that physician advisors were the leaders they trusted to make documentation requests make sense (Nepal et al., 2026). The director will therefore ask a physician advisor to deliver the delinquency message to medical staff, rather than relying on HIM reminders alone.

Controlling

Controlling measures performance, compares it with the standard and takes corrective action. The department will use a weekly dashboard with the three goal measures at the top and supporting measures below: accuracy by coder and by error type, delinquent records by physician and by deficiency type, and release of information requests by age and type. When a measure misses its milestone, the responsible team lead must identify the cause and propose a correction within one week. For example, if coding accuracy stalls at 93% because of errors in one type of case, the correction is targeted education on that case type, not a general retraining. Controls also protect quality as speed improves: release of information turnaround will be tracked alongside the number of requests released with errors, so that the team does not meet the five-day target by cutting corners.

Communication Strategies

Each audience needs a different message, channel and timing. The communication plan is summarized below.

Two principles shape this plan. First, remote and hybrid work is now common for health information professionals (Hamada et al., 2026), and communication for remote staff must be deliberate, because the informal hallway conversations that once spread news no longer happen; every important change will be announced in the monthly meeting and confirmed in writing. Second, communication runs both ways. Each all-staff meeting will end with questions, and team leads will bring concerns from their one-on-one meetings to the weekly huddle, so problems reach the director before they appear on the dashboard.

Conclusion

The four functions of management work as a cycle. Planning sets targets and resources, organizing builds teams around the work, leading helps people accept and pursue the change, and controlling shows whether the department is on track and what to fix. With a communication plan that reaches each audience in the right way, the consolidated department has a realistic path to its accuracy, completion and turnaround goals.

References

Hamada, D., Lalani, K., Brodnik, M., Fenton, S. H., Kennedy, A., Marc, D. T., Payne, V. L., & Reynolds, R. (2026). Workforce review of health information technology associate-degree graduates: 2017-2024. Advances in Health Information Science and Practice, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.63116/AH.000000002

Nepal, S., Allyn, R., Keniston, A., & Pierce, R. (2026). A conundrum in clinical practice: Clinical documentation queries, more money, or more problems? A qualitative survey of hospitalists and surgeons in a safety-net academic medical center. Journal of Hospital Medicine. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhm.70398

Robbins, S. P., & Coulter, M. (2021). Management (15th ed.). Pearson.