Those who work inside the increasingly complex maze that is the American healthcare system can find it challenging to navigate. For those on the outside, the maze can be simply overwhelming. No wonder so many patients either slip through the cracks or fail to follow through with the care they…
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Recent discussions about physician burnout have taken some interesting turns. Some say the wrong questions are being asked and the wrong solutions are being proposed. Some even question whether the term “burnout” is appropriate to label the well-publicized epidemic of exhaustion among physicians. “The term burnout has taken on meaning far beyond…
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The goal when it comes to coding, says physician-blogger Erica E. Remer, should be “to see that the patient looks as sick in the medical record as he or she does in real life.” If you don’t make it clear how sick a patient really is, chances are you’ll end up…
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There are now nearly 500 Medicare accountable care organizations (ACOs) participating in the Shared Savings Program and the Pioneer ACO Model combined. About one-third of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), fee-for-service payments are tied to these alternative payment models saving over $411 million for Medicare in just one year….
Continue Reading...We’ve written previously about how quality care occurs at the intersection of time and efficiency — interestingly, though, the most efficient hospitals have systems in place that translate directly to high-quality care. The concepts, it seems, are inextricably linked. To wit: Out of nearly 1300 hospitals, the authors chose four hospitals to…
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Now that ICD-10 is here, it’s more important than ever that you submit clean claims for services provided to Medicare patients, as well as those with private insurance. Early reports indicate that the denial rate since the transition to ICD-10 is hovering around 10%. That’s at the high end of the industry-average…
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Recently, there’s been a lot of misinformation floating around about medical scribes. It’s understandable that physicians and hospitals may be wary of the idea if they’ve never worked with scribes. A lot of ideas for the “next best thing” in medicine are touted at seemingly every turn, it’s true. However,…
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Research has shown that using medical scribes confers a laundry list of benefits. Patient satisfaction increaseswhere scribes are used, for a start. Physicians, too, experience an increase in job satisfaction, according to a report in the Annals of Family Medicine — not to mention the time savings they report. One physician says he can now review 15 to 20…
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Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether healthcare is in such turmoil because the people on the inside of the system — administrators, physicians, nurses — are leading the charge to do more, and more efficiently for a growing number of patients; or if it’s because the institutions outside the system…
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Electronic health records (EHR) are here to stay. There’s even a federal program administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to encourage “meaningful use” of digital documentation. On the surface, the idea of implementing EHR is great: issues with illegible handwriting and sharing paper records should be eliminated, and information…
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