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Moderate to large hospitals generally have full-time coders, whose job is to take the records generated during a patient's stay and figure out which codes apply
by Floegipoky 11y ago
Moderate to large hospitals generally have full-time coders, whose job is to take the records generated during a patient's stay and figure out which codes apply. There's a lot of money in what's called 'up-coding', or using a similar code that pays more.
- hga 11y agoWhile lower population areas are losing their only hospitals due to "one size fits all" stuff like this (see e.g. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/12/rural-hospital-closings-federal-reimbursement-medicaid-aca/18532471/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/12/rural-h...), and in my "moderate" sized market, all the doctors I know of are now working for "the man", one of the two big hospital complexes, or otherwise outsourcing this sort of thing to them.
- Floegipoky 11y agoYou're right, that's a huge problem. Critical access hospitals are really struggling, and many smaller hospitals and clinics are getting swallowed up by big hospitals somewhat nearby. A side effect of that is that the newly-acquired sites are often migrated to the records system of the new owner, which is creating silos of medical records. The problem is that the silos still aren't connected to one another, which means the vast majority of hospitals still have to transfer records through fax. I really wish I was joking about that.