Hello, my name is Kelly Cotton, and I am the Senior Program Coordinator for the Office of Telemedicine. I like to define my role as the fuel that keeps the ship running, without being the one that runs the ship. I'm responsible for many aspects of our office in this role, and I'm hoping to cover most of them in this module. Let's get started. In this course, we'll review our team structure, the key players in telemedicine programs, communication, our program development process. Submission guidelines that are needed in order to begin the project management process in developing a telemedicine program. And a quick view of our process map and how the RACI methodology helped us to define who does what and understand how it all connects. Lastly, we will look at leveraging project management software to help with meeting preparation and task delegation. Pictured here is a part of our team, specifically the leadership portion. We are a blended mix of three pillars, clinical, operational and IT. Seen here, you will find Brian Hasselfeld and Helen Hughes, our medical directors, Rebecca Canino and Emmanuel Opati, our operational leaders, and Eric Brown and Cindy Diaz, our IT leaders. In addition to these folks we have four project leads, one specifically for Epic builds, two on the IT side and one on the operations side. Then there is my role as the senior program coordinator for the office. And then we also have part-time team members that work with our office as a part of their full-time effort. These roles include our project manager on the Epic IT side, our financial project manager and our business intelligence analyst. We are actively seeking an additional IT analyst and a senior operations intelligence analyst to join our team. In this module, I will sometimes use the words projects and programs interchangeably. But to be clear, within our office, our project leads are assigned to manage the project of developing telemedicine programs. I hope this is helpful as we navigate through the rest of this lesson. Each project must have a designated project champion from their requesting department. They will be a key player in moving their project forward. In order for our office to be successful in delivering the promise of telemedicine, we work closely with our legal and billing partners to ensure that we are developing programs that are compliant, sustainable, scalable, and in most cases, profitable. Here lately it seems as if state waivers and regulations are changing by the month, week or even the day, and the same can be said for payer landscape. The Office of Telemedicine also works closely with marketing and communications to ensure that we are reaching as many Hopkins staff members and patients in respective communications of updates and offerings from our office. We have continued to partner with the government affairs team to provide them with support and testimony for pending legislation. Part of my role is ensuring that these players interact when needed. Which brings me to the importance of communication. As a program coordinator for the office, I am essentially the only administrative support person for our team of 10 to 12. Connecting my team to the right key players is a vital piece of the coordination puzzle that is needed in order to move a project forward, which at completion creates a telemedicine program. I assist in coordinating kickoff meetings, scheduling programs for billing meetings to have their workflows and codes tested. I also coordinate dry runs or testing of new programs workflows with our EMR when needed. In addition to these types of everyday communication, when telemedicine became widespread in March of 2020, I began to manage the communications that were sent from our office to bulk recipients. We bucket these recipients into three teams, leadership, operations and clinical, and administrative. We call these communications from our office announcements, hoping to entice readers. I don't know how many emails that you guys get at your job every day, but at Hopkins, it can be an overload. So with that in mind, we try to keep these announcements short, sweet and to the point. Our goal is typically one page or less. In the height of the pandemic, I would send out these announcements twice a day, typically an AM and a PM update. As we slowly return to our new normal, it has decreased to weekly in most cases. I typically craft the document and then post it in a shared space where other contributors can read it over and edit as they wish. Then once finalized, I share it with the appropriate distribution list. Here you see our program development process. When I joined the Office of Telemedicine in September of 2019, the telemedicine program applications were submitted on a Word document. How archaic, right? We moved from paper applications to an electronic submission process officially in November of 2020. We reviewed several different options of software to utilize for this electronic submission process and concluded that using Jira was the best option for our project management and operations teams. Our office built a process in Jira that allows anyone within Johns Hopkins Medicine to submit a design Jira or a telemedicine program they wish to establish. Once the staff member submits the Jira, the Office of Telemedicine operations team is notified, and they are reviewed weekly. Some are scheduled for design, some are pushed to a project lead, and some are delegated to a leadership team member for further review. Those projects that are ready for design, I reach out to the project champion and their team to coordinate them to present in an upcoming design meeting, which is attended by our entire telemedicine team. Each of these updates is noted in the Jira. When the project champion comes to present at a telemedicine design meeting, they walk us through their program concepts and both parties have the opportunity to ask questions. Depending on the complexity of the program, if it is ready to be assigned to a project lead, that is done at the completion of the design meeting. This assignment is also updated in the Jira. Any legal, billing, or other discussions that are needed regarding this program are also found in the Jira. We have made several updates to this process in the Jira since we began using it last year. As we utilize it more and more, we learn what works for us and what doesn't, and then we make changes to the process as needed to refine it. Looking into the future, we hope that our team uses Jira more and more for project management and as a central location for all of us to be able to know the status of each project at any given time. Submission guidelines. When any one or more of these aspects are present in a project or program, a Jira is needed. A designee from the department, whether it be a project champion or a clinical champion, completes a Jira. As discussed in a previous slide, once the Jira is submitted, it is reviewed by the operations team and either scheduled for design meeting, pushed to leadership for further review, or directly assigned to a project lead for next steps. If the department is seeking to expand on a current program, they wouldn't necessarily need to follow this process. They would reach out to the project lead that helped them previously for direction. Process map, I know this slide is very busy, but I wanted to show you a snapshot of how many steps are involved in creating the telemedicine programs. A few slides ago you saw the high level eight step process. This process map is a more detailed view of those eight steps. One could think that setting up a program for telemedicine is simple and straightforward, but sometimes it's the complete opposite. This process map captures each step of our program development process from start, which is submitting a Jira, to finish, which is transition to support. The organizational development department here at Hopkins helped us put this massive process on paper. Which then helped us to better understand the process as a whole within our team and to identify any gaps or see where things could potentially get lost or delayed within the process. As I mentioned in a previous slide, some of the key players that help move these programs forward are billing and legal. We meet with our billing partners two times a week to review subtasks associated with programs' billing codes, workflows, charge routing and logic, as well as compliance and testing. We meet with our legal partners twice a month to review programs with any legal subtasks that may be associated. The average length of time that it takes to get a program to go live is about four months. Some are less complicated, which means a shorter time for the design and build, which means less than four months. And then others are more complicated, which means more time is needed and effort goes into the build so they take longer. The Jira software helps us to manage the project by showing the timeline of start to finish for the project as a whole. And it also tells us how long each subtask for legal billing or implementation takes to get accomplished. We are still fine-tuning this process. As I stated before, recently we partnered with our Organizational Development Office here at Hopkins in a guided review using the RACI methodology to help us define roles and responsibilities for all the tasks within our office. Since we were lucky enough to grow during the pandemic by two FTEs, this expansion created the need for us to realign and reassign duties within our office. I'm always looking for ways to work smarter and not harder, and for my team to flow the most efficient way possible because they cover an incredible amount of ground. So in this RACI review, we used a chart to break down each task that was listed in the process map in the previous slide to a responsible person, an accountable person, a consulted person, and an informed person. And this breakdown helped us decide who was needed in which meeting going forward. Leveraging software, with our office redesign came new meetings, but with new purpose. This slide shows an example of how we used Jira to populate a dashboard that we utilize for meeting agendas for our weekly IT and OPS meeting. These projects have been tagged with both the OPS and IT teams to review because they have a need that requires attention from both teams. We also use dashboards like this one that have their own special tags for other meetings, such as leadership meetings, legal and billing meetings. The use of these tags, which may be called something different depending on the project management software that you use, helps us to populate the specific dashboard that are used with each of the respective meetings. These dashboards assist us in meeting prep, which means our meetings are more efficient and allow us the best use of our time. They also help us to identify the delineation of duties for each process and encourages personal accountability. I hope that you have learned how program coordination plays a vital part of the telemedicine programs success. Each role on our team plays a unique part in our process and each is crucial. Project leads set the course, leadership guides the priorities. But without someone to make sure that the ship has the fuel that it needs to run, it wouldn't go very far. Please keep this role in mind as you're planning for your telemedicine program. Thank you.
