One of the most interesting session at the AHIMA 2025 conference was called, “Building a Foundation for Success: A Collaborative Journey in HIM Leadership and Team Transformation.” In this session, Ja’neese Denson from Huntsville Hospital and Kim Conner BSN, CCDS, CCDS-O from Enjoin, talked about the challenging HIM experience that Denson faced when Denson was left holding a lot of responsibility after some important staff left.
This is a story of resilience, collaboration with a high quality CDI partner, and an HIM leader with a vision of where her healthcare organization needed to go.
I was able to capture a bunch of the key insights and Denson and Conner shared in their presentation. You’ll find most of them below along with some additional commentary.
I’ll admit that going into the session, I didn’t know what to expect from the session. However, it made for a really interesting use case for other healthcare organizations that may be in challenging positions like losing staff.
I really do love that Denson was willing to be vulnerable with the audience in this presentation. Far too often we go to conferences and people share that everything is fine and that it’s always been fine. The funny thing is that we all know that’s not the reality, so there’s no reason to hide that healthcare has some really challenging situation. Losing staff is a really great example of this.
I was impressed that both Denson and Conner emphasized the need to celebrate their successes. Listening to them share their vision and how they would celebrate various successes along the way helped me see how those early wins were the “jet fuel” that was needed for her organization to lean into the HIM vision that was put out.
This was really wise counsel from Denson. A really good first step is to “stop the bleeding.” This can be challenging because many people can see the end state of where they want to be. When you can see that future, it can be hard to be patient and address the pain points of today while looking at new opportunities to improve.
Reading through this list, I’m sure that a bunch of HIM professionals can relate. One thing that stood out to me was how long it took to onboard a new coding manager. I guess that’s at least part of why so many HIM departments are looking to outsource some of their work so that the company providing the service has to manage things like retention and bonuses.
One of the core messages from this session was the need to collaborate with your partners and your team. I thought this was a really nice framework for how they collaborated across teams.
For those looking to measure the impact, I thought this slide from the presentation provided a lot of great impacts worth measuring. Although, but I thought Denson’s point about not making these measurements punitive was important. Plus, the data can be leveraged to effectively tell the story of why things like CDI (Clinical Documentation Improvement) are so valuable to a healthcare organization.
Such a fascinating juxtaposition. I think many of us try to soften the blow for our teams. While there may be times where this makes sense, a good leader is going to be direct and clear in their leadship efforts. Doing so will build trust and create amazing results like the ones listed above.
It was great to see the actual qualitative data that illustrates the success of this CDI program run by Enjoin and Huntsville Hospital. That’s some significant improvement.
These were some great healthcare leadership lessons that were shared. I love both “Trust was earned, not assumed” and “Transparency in data created alignment.” Both of these can be implemented in a lot of places in healthcare, but it does take some humility to live these principles as a leader.
It was clear to see how Conner from Enjoin and Denson from Huntsville Hospital and created a really close bond that led to good results. I’d love to hear your thoughts on social media about the topics introduced in this session. What do you think of them? What would you add to the discussion?
