HLTH 4925 Week 3 Artifact Analysis Paper Example

What the Referral Process Map Actually Demonstrates: Checking a Claim About Analysis Against the Object It Is About

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 4925: Seminar in Reflective and Applied Learning

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What the Referral Process Map Actually Demonstrates: Checking a Claim About Analysis Against the Object It Is About

The Artifact and the Claim

The artifact is a swim-lane process map of the referral process at my clinic, drawn for the operations management proposal reflected on last week. It has five lanes, for the referring physician's office, the referral coordinator, the insurance verification team, the specialist's scheduler and the patient, and 23 steps from the referral's arrival to the scheduled appointment. In my program self-assessment I wrote that this map demonstrates my ability to analyze a health care process. This paper checks that claim against the map itself. The clinic is a composite for this seminar.

What the Map Shows

The map is accurate, and its accuracy was earned rather than assumed. I checked it at the time by walking two referrals through the process and asking each lane's staff whether the steps were right. It shows four handoffs between lanes, two points where a referral waits for information from outside the clinic, insurance authorization and missing clinical notes, and one loop where an incomplete referral is sent back to the referring office and re-enters the queue. The instructor's comment, accurate and clear, was the one piece of praise on the proposal. Improvement teams in health care map processes because a drawing makes a process visible to the people who work in different parts of it (Antonacci et al., 2018).

What the Map Does Not Show

The map shows steps but no times. It does not say how long a referral spends at each step, how long it waits between steps or how often the loop for incomplete referrals is taken. It does not show volume, such as how many referrals arrive per day. It does not identify which step causes most of the delay. When researchers reviewed improvement projects that used process maps, they found the maps were often used to describe processes but less often linked to measurement or to the selection of changes (Antonacci et al., 2018), and my map fits that pattern.

Testing the Claim

Analysis, in the sense my operations course used it, means breaking a process into parts and determining which parts drive its performance. The map breaks the process into parts. It does not determine which parts drive performance, because it carries no data about performance. The claim that the map demonstrates my ability to analyze a process therefore does not survive the check. What the map demonstrates is narrower: that I can document a cross-department process accurately and verify it with the people who do the work. That is a real skill and worth claiming. It is not the skill I claimed.

The test I used is one any reader could repeat. Take the verb in the claim, analyze, and ask what a person would have to produce to show it. Then look for that product in the artifact. Here the product would be a judgment about which step drives the delay, backed by data. The map contains no such judgment, so the verb has to change to one the map can support, document.

Why the Overclaim Happened

I think I overclaimed because the map felt like analysis while I was drawing it. I was learning things about the process I had not known, such as the loop for incomplete referrals, and that discovery felt like analytical work. But learning about a process and analyzing its performance are different. Research on self-assessment in health care suggests that professionals' judgments of their own competence often agree poorly with external measures (Davis et al., 2006). An artifact analysis is one way to check self-assessment against something outside it, which is what this exercise did.

How the Overclaim Would Have Looked to a Reader

An employer or admissions reader looking at my portfolio would see the map and the caption analysis of a health care process. A careful reader would look for the analysis and find a well-drawn diagram. That reader might reasonably conclude either that I do not know the difference between documentation and analysis, or that I inflate my work. Either impression would cost me more than a modest, accurate caption would. The artifact itself is strong; the overclaim makes it look weaker by promising something it does not deliver.

There is also a cost to me. If I believe I can already analyze processes, I have no reason to learn how to collect and use time data. Checking the claim exposed a skill I still need, which is more useful than a flattering caption.

What Would Make the Claim True

The original claim would be supported by an artifact that adds data to the map: timestamps for a sample of referrals at each step, a count of how often the incomplete-referral loop is taken and an identification of the step where most waiting occurs. I can produce that from our scheduling and referral systems. The revision planned for week 10 will add a time-stamped version of the map for twenty referrals, which would let me claim analysis honestly. Until then, my portfolio should describe this artifact as evidence of process documentation.

What the Exercise Taught About Artifacts

The exercise showed me that an artifact can be good and still not support the claim attached to it. The map is the best piece of work in the proposal. The problem was my description of what it demonstrated. Portfolio research suggests that evidence supports reflection when learners connect artifacts to specific competencies with care (Driessen et al., 2005). Checking a claim against its object is the simplest form of that care, and I expect to repeat it for every artifact I select in this seminar.

The rule I am taking from this week is simple enough to apply quickly, even with a dozen artifacts to sort: before attaching a skill to an artifact, point to the part of the artifact where the skill is visible. If I cannot point to it, the claim needs to shrink or the artifact needs more work.

References

Antonacci, G., Reed, J. E., Lennox, L., & Barlow, J. (2018). The use of process mapping in healthcare quality improvement projects. Health Services Management Research, 31(2), 74-84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0951484818770411

Davis, D. A., Mazmanian, P. E., Fordis, M., Van Harrison, R., Thorpe, K. E., & Perrier, L. (2006). Accuracy of physician self-assessment compared with observed measures of competence: A systematic review. JAMA, 296(9), 1094-1102. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.296.9.1094

Driessen, E. W., van Tartwijk, J., Overeem, K., Vermunt, J. D., & van der Vleuten, C. P. M. (2005). Conditions for successful reflective use of portfolios in undergraduate medical education. Medical Education, 39(12), 1230-1235. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2005.02337.x