Take My SNHU HIM 660 Class

HIM 660 asks HIM leaders to speak the language of finance. A director who can show that a backlog of uncoded charts is costing the hospital a measurable amount of cash every day gets resources; one who only describes the backlog usually does not.

The reimbursement modules in HIM 660 usually survey how care is paid for: the inpatient prospective payment system and MS-DRGs, the outpatient system and APCs, the physician fee schedule and relative value units, post-acute payment systems, and value-based programs such as readmission penalties, hospital value-based purchasing and the physician quality payment program, along with capitation and bundled payments. Students trace how coding and documentation feed each one.

The revenue cycle and analytics modules treat the cycle as a financial system and use data to manage it: aging reports, case mix trends, denial patterns, payer mix, dashboards and the analysis that turns them into decisions.

The financial management modules cover HIM department budgets, operating and capital, staffing cost, variance analysis, cost-benefit and return on investment for HIM projects such as outsourcing, computer-assisted coding or a different way of handling records requests, and forecasting methods from simple trend lines to moving averages and regression.

The planning modules bring it together with mission and vision, environmental scanning, SWOT, goals and a balanced scorecard. Graded HIM 660 work usually includes discussions, financial analyses, a forecast, a business case and an HIM strategic plan with its budget.

HIM 660 starts with a short conversation about the HIM department the plan will serve, since a hospital's HIM function, a physician group's revenue cycle team and an outsourcing firm plan and budget very differently. The HIM director then reads your HIM 660 syllabus and rubrics with that department in mind.

Every HIM 660 week has its post ready before it opens. In the reimbursement week, the post might show how failing to document a major complication moves a pneumonia case to a lower-weighted DRG and what that does to payment. In the forecasting week, it might project next year's coding volume from three years of discharges and explain why a new orthopedic program changes the trend. HIM 660 replies give classmates a formula, a benchmark or a payment rule that sharpens their numbers.

Financial analyses are built in spreadsheets with assumptions on their own tab. Business cases show costs, savings, payback and return. Forecasts state the method and its limits.

The HIM 660 strategic plan grows in stages, and each grade shapes the next one.

The authors of HIM 660 work have owned budgets themselves: HIM directors and revenue cycle managers who sat across from a CFO each year to justify headcount, software and outsourcing.

They have tracked case mix index, built staffing models from productivity data and weighed outsourcing against hiring, so HIM 660 numbers come with defensible assumptions.

A second HIM finance professional checks every HIM 660 spreadsheet and paper for correct calculations and fit with the rubric.

All financial data in HIM 660 work is invented for the exercise or supplied by your course.

The first difficulty in HIM 660 is the payment systems. DRGs, APCs, relative value units and value-based adjustments each work differently, and students must explain how coding and documentation change payment under each.

The second is financial method. Variance analysis, return on investment, net present value and payback periods are new to many HIM students, and a formula applied wrongly undoes a whole business case.

The third is forecasting. Choosing a method, handling seasonality and explaining what could make the forecast wrong takes judgment as well as arithmetic.

The fourth is the plan. HIM 660 rubrics expect a strategic plan whose goals connect to the organization's strategy, whose measures appear on a scorecard and whose budget pays for its initiatives. Students who build each piece separately find the numbers do not agree at the end of the term.

Most HIM 660 hours go into the spreadsheets: the financial analyses, the forecast, the business case and the budget inside the strategic plan. Discussion weeks are lighter.

When HIM 660 comes to us early, the department is fixed before any spreadsheet is built, and each analysis becomes a piece of the final plan. If HIM 660 is already under way, your submitted work is read and the open week continues it.

One HIM 660 figure covers the remaining posts, analyses, forecasts, business case and plan stages, each with a delivery day.

If your HIM department faces a real decision, such as outsourcing coding, a similar case can frame the HIM 660 business case with invented figures.

Because HIM 660 numbers build on each other, the payment examples, the forecast and the business case all use the same department figures, so the final plan's budget can be traced back to the earlier work.