Practicing Health Care Professional Meeting and Project Approval Guide
Purpose of the Meeting
The purpose of this meeting is to:
Schedule the Meeting
After identifying your first choice for a point of contact in the organization, you need to contact that person and schedule a meeting. The meeting can take place in person, via web conference, or over the phone. Be prepared to contact a second person if you are unable to meet your first choice.
Note: Face-to-face interaction is essential for developing a strong professional network. An in-person meeting is strongly encouraged. However, if you are unable to meet with the client in person, consider hosting an online meeting to increase the level of engagement in the call.
Initiate Contact
You are encouraged to use the following sample talking points to initiate contact with the health care organization:
My name is [insert your name]. I am a learner in the health care administration undergraduate program at Capella University. I am currently enrolled in the capstone course, in which learners help a health care organization examine a real-world issue or problem. The topic must be one in which I can examine the existing information or data, either from a practicing health care professional or perhaps the data that has already been collected. Potential examples include patient satisfaction surveys, compliance with a new regulation, patient safety initiatives, or evaluating process deviations for a new service line offering or system, such as admitting home care patients onto the service.
I am offering to volunteer my services to draft a project proposal, complete a data review, and provide recommendations on how to address the issue. These recommendations will include insights from current peer-reviewed health care journals.
Would you be willing to work with me on a project that examines data on [insert topic here; for example, compliance with the new hospice reimbursement system]? This would involve meeting with me for 15–20 minutes to provide feedback on how I would examine and organize the data. Then I would review the data, review the relevant, authoritative literature, and provide a project report, with my findings, at the end of the course.
Would this be helpful, and if so, may I contact you via e-mail to send a copy of the draft proposal after my faculty member has approved it? Thanks so much for your time,
[Your name]
Health Care Professional Background and Communication Preferences
Consider the following questions before you meet with the selected health care professional:
Present Your Project Proposal
At the meeting, present the project proposal you developed in Assessment 1, and explain your role as a undergraduate learner offering a health care problem analysis project as a part of your degree completion requirement at Capella University.
Refine Your Project Proposal
After presenting your proposal, request feedback from the health care professional on the scope and feasibility of your project. In addition, attempt to identify examples of evidence-based support for selected key performance indicators, determine whether you can gain access to additional related data sets, and verify the accessibility of data sets that could be made available for you to review.
The meeting is an opportunity to work with the health care professional to redefine the performance indicators and outcome measures that you propose to examine. It is also an opportunity to make changes that will be of mutual benefit and enhance the project’s outcome. Before approving your health care problem analysis proposal, the health care professional may have a few suggestions to enhance your data analysis, such as adding a performance indicator, using a specific benchmark, or using an existing assessment tool. This individual may also want to add something to your project for inclusion in the final report or may want you to spend more time on the project than is allotted. In such instances, you must negotiate a solution that meets the course requirements and your health care professional’s needs.
It is your job to verify, discover, or redefine your performance indicators and outcome measures so you can proceed to your data review. Consequently, you may wish to initiate a preliminary discussion with your health care professional on the following points:
o Scope definition.
o Service completion.
o Client outcomes.
During the meeting, you may discover the following:
Obtain Project Approval
Agree to submit a revised project proposal, which integrates the health care professional’s feedback and any negotiated changes, before you end the meeting. Try to obtain a commitment from this individual to sign and return the approved proposal so that you may proceed with the data review. Submit the revised proposal to the health care professional for final approval. Ensure that this individual signs the revised copy of your proposal.
Meeting Follow-Up
Although it is not required, you may choose to follow up with your health care professional via e-mail or phone after completing the assessment. This would be an ideal time to extend your thanks for reviewing your initial proposal. You may offer to e-mail the health care professional a draft of the project report that you will complete in the next assessment. Upon receiving the report, this individual has the option to review the type and purpose of the data you are analyzing, how you will organize it, and how the data will be presented in the final report.