coding – HEALTHCARE BEAT

Highlights From The 2016 State of The Medicine Address

GomerBlog highlights the major points from tonight’s State of The Medicine Address given by the President of Hospital Administrators, Mr. Cutter Salary.

Hospitals now have the highest patient satisfaction in the history of healthcare and probably correlates to increased quality of care according to patients and lawmakers

WiFi, fast food restaurants, and pianos are distributed throughout hospital lobbies replacing exam rooms and useless medical equipment

Doctors now spend 50% of their time coding which is a vast improvement over last year and has led to spectacular reimbursement rates to enable hiring of more administrators. Remember Caring IS Coding!

Unnecessary Nurse bonuses were removed in a major cost saving move this year. To save even more money, cuts will start with the nursing staff and end with the nursing staff

More paperwork was passed by the Joint Commission providing critical safety measures requiring timeouts before codes to prevent wrong sided CPR

Drinks were finally stripped from the Nursing Station. This year we must continue with stripping any fun or laughter from the Station. We don’t want our patients thinking we are making fun of them

Breaks are vanishing from the workplace and we need to continue that for our medical providers. Foley catheters were distributed to staff to help our providers perform flawless and uninterrupted care

Surgeons are required to perform 3 more surgeries a day and leave when it is dark outside. Skin cancer rates are drastically down in our employees now thanks to this move.

Patient to Nurse ratios are at an all-time high providing a challenging and dynamic work environment to our nursing staff, which we know they enjoy

Physicians are burning out quicker than ever and we are replacing them with cost cutting google university graduated patients

The new Secretary of The Medicine, Dr. Oz, continues to utilize his charismatic charm to educate the public before they come to the hospital

And finally, our budget has been passed and includes hiring another 1.2 million hospital administrators to oversee and provide outstanding medical care to our hospitals!

“God Bless The Medicine and God Bless my obnoxiously large pension!”
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MEDICAL CODING & BILLERS

A Visual Guide to Medical Coding

Medical

As of October 1, 2015, there will be more than 144,000 codes that may be applied to patient “stories”

Medical coders provide a critical link between health care providers who are busy caring for patients, and patient insurance companies. Ensuring patient care “stories” are passed to insurance providers in ways they will honor.

Citations:

Copy & Paste is not okay? Say what???

“Seventy-four to 90 percent of physicians use the copy/paste function in their EHRs, and between 20 to 78 percent of physician notes are copied text, according to a September AHIMA report.”

“It’s become such a compliance and payment problem that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius together with Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letter last year to industry medical groups underscoring the seriousness of doctors “gaming the system, possibly to obtain payments to which they are not entitled.”

We have spent a lot of time educating our students and MTs about the deadliness of the copy/paste function in medical transcription. There can be serious errors made and the veteran healthcare documentation specialist has learned this over the last decade or two. However, it is apparently common to see this going on in the EHR. Take a look …

EHR copy and paste? Better think twice
Healthcare IT News
Who would have thought that something so simple as copy and paste could have such serious consequences? Speaking at the MGMA annual conference in San Diego, Diana Warner, director at AHIMA, confirmed the seriousness of inappropriately using copy and paste functions in electronic health records. And the government agrees — it’s no laughing matter.

Fraud & Abuse with EHR … hmmmm

Keeping up with all of the information regarding EHR implementation is nearly a full time job. Every day, hospitals acquire more smaller practices because it is becoming impossible to keep up with the regulations and being able to afford to practice. I wondered about those able to find loop holes and ways to get by with minimal effort and capture incentives. I find this another interesting piece of the puzzle …

If this doesn’t sum it all up, I am not sure what does!

“EHRs are also driving the industry toward charts that look remarkably similar because they’re based on templates created by the technology vendors — that includes often using the same words. And that threatens to make doctors appear to be committing fraud by the practice of record cloning, or cutting and pasting from one record to another, when they are not, in fact, acting fraudulently. Alongside the federal mandate to implement an EHR under threat of a monetary fine, that creates what Stack called “an appalling Catch-22 for physicians.

Put another way: The government mandates that doctors use an EHR, the EHR vendors’ templates can sometimes create an appearance of fraud and that, in turn, opens the door for payers to decline reimbursement or, even worse, the government to prosecute doctors for the crime.

As dire as that sounds, it’s an exception that belies the unproven perception that EHRs perpetuate fraud. “Upcoding does not necessarily equate to fraud and abuse,” said Sue Bowman, AHIMA’s senior director of coding and compliance at the same event. “This is an area where more study is needed. We really need to know the causes. Further research is needed on the fraud risk of using EHRs.”

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