Parkland hospital was first built as a charity hospital in 1894 in Dallas Texas. It is also historically known as the hospital where President John F. Kennedy was rushed to after he was fatally wounded in 1963 by an assassin. Since then Parkland Hospital has morphed into a billion dollar organization where patients from all different backgrounds come seeking medical attention on a daily basis. How has it come to be this way? There could be many reasons. One could argue that the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid contributed tremendously to Parkland's growth.
Before 1965 Parkland Hospital has always seen a steady growth, but shortly after the signing of Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965, there was a sudden spike in growth activity within Parkland's organization. This growth could have been contributed to the influx of money coming in from medicare payments going to the hospital. Three years after the Medicare and Medicaid was signed into law beginning from 1968 through 1973, Parkland opened 9 new specialty care units. In 1978 Parkland had to form a patient care committee to review Medicare and patient services studies and to look at ways to ensure Parkland's long-term viability (Parkland, 2014).
At this present time Parkland hospital has 861 adult beds, 107 neonatal beds and a number of clinics in the surrounding neighborhoods . They see a combination of indigent, elderly, psychiatric and inmate patients everyday. According to Parkland's 2013 financial summary about 42 percent of insurance payers came from Medicare and Medicaid payers (Parkland, 2013). That was close to half of Parkland's patient population. Earlier in 2011 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services threatened to cut off Parkland's Medicare and Medicaid programs. This would have put the organization at the risk of loosing $462 million a year in payments (Hethcock, 2011). If they were to loose that funding then that would be a big chunk out of Parkland's yearly revenue. This is money they definitely need since they are having problems with overcrowding. They are remedying this problem by building a new state of the art facility right across the street. Construction has been completed and there are plans to move in by May of 2015. If you were to pick up a copy of the Dallas Morning Newspaper then chances are you would probably find something about Parkland Memorial Hospital In it. It is the most talked about hospital in Texas and sometimes the entire united states. Because of the type of patient population Parkland has to deal with on a daily basis the hospital has been under scrutiny when it comes to the quality and safety of their patient care services. This may explain why Parkland does not have a values statement. A values statement is based on respect for human dignity or acceptance of equality. With all of the negative press in the news one could see why there is no vision statement for Parkland hospital.
The missions statement of Parkland hospital is simple. It states “We are dedicated to the health and well-being of individuals and communities entrusted to our care (Parkland, 2014).” Regardless of what the news reports, the overall quality of the hospital speaks for itself. The truth is when it comes to patient care, Parkland Memorial Hospital is one of the best. They really are dedicated to the well-being of individuals. Just look at their 10 centers of excellence for example. The list includes a burn unit which was created in 1962 and is one of the largest in the nation. Their stroke center recently won an award this year from the American Heart Association for implementing the association's specific quality improvement measures (Parkland, 2014). Others include a level 1 trauma center, orthopedic center, women and infants center and much more. This shows that Parkland cares about the quality of care that their patient receive. Parkland is not just hospital based. They continually trying to find ways to provide services and health care education to the community. In order to bridge the gap between hospital and community they have a department specifically aimed towards the health care needs of the community. To provide health care services to the surrounding neighborhoods of Dallas County, they created Parkland Community Oriented Primary Care Clinics (COPC). Their community outreach programs such as the homeless medical outreach service (HOMES) provide care to homeless adult and children by using two mobile medical units at different sites in the community. Also their other outreach programs such as rape intervention, smoking cessations, Dallas healthy start has been a success. One of the ways that Parkland promotes current and future improvement initiatives is by utilizing a non profit organization called PCCI, Parkland Center for Clinical Information. PCCI uses real-time predictive and surveillance analytics for health care. They achieve this by using an electronic platform that connects health care and community based organizations. On top of this is a decision based platform which sift through a massive amount of data to determine the most relevant information that a provider may need to give the best possible care to a patient. PCCI also use an intelligent system to predict what the patient's outcome may be. The system will send out an alert to the care team. Through this organization's research parkland can advanced the quality and safety of their patient's care. One way Parkland used health informatics techniologies to impact their healthcare delivery system is by using a new scrubbing software in their billing department. In the past Parkland encountered problems with submitting claims to Medicare. They submitted them manually and that resulted in many errors and resubmissions of alot of claims. Resubmitting claims and correcting errors took time which brought delays in reimbursemnt to the hospital. In 2009 they went live with the electronic health record. It was also within that same year Parkland started to move forward with a new scrubbing software to catch errors when submitting claims to Medicare. The outcome was excellent. Because of the new software the organization's billing department was able to identify errors before claims were submitted and correct them then. It also resulted in claims being processed faster.

With the implementation of ICD-10-CM about to take place, Parkland has been preparing for it well ahead of time. The organization has been trying to figure out some ways to smoothly transition into the big project. The decision was to initiate computer assisted coding. This will be something which will be something very new to the impacted employees of the organization. Some benefits of computer assisted coding is that it is supposed reduce errors in reimbursement and increases a coder's productivity. The the software program does this by scanning over the entire medical record of a patient. It then uses decision making technology to suggest a code based on what different providers documented in the patient's medical record. Parkland Hospital contracted with a company called M*M modal. This is a company they are well familiar with since they use them for their transcription services for speech recognition technology(M*Modal,2012)

References

M*Modal (2012) M*Modal technology to enable smoother, methodical ICD-10 transition.

An expansion of the mission that expresses basic rules of acceptable conduct, such as respect for human dignity or acceptance of equality