Posted on 03/05/2014 6:05:16 AM PST by rktman
Less visits for me. Don’t want to deal with it unless it’s an emergency. Deductibles will never be met.
> It sounds funny, but is deadly serious. The wrong code can cost thousands of dollars in reimbursement and literally end the doc in court, jail or heavily fined. Not only is it totally ridiculous, but wastes time that could be spent caring for patients, costs untold millions in labor expenses, and is
a giant game of russian roulette. Get the government out of my face.
Human error is being turned into infractions for profit with this administration. I imagine some underground lab is developing an apparatus that reads human minds for the feds as we speak so they can bring their fantasy delusions of thoughtcrime to fruition. How I despise this administration and their blatantly evil intentions.
Physician friends already tell me that Obamacare has increased their workload/decreased their productivity by 30%.
Young black female doc I saw recently told me she wished she had never decided to go to med school with all her loans to repay and not being able to really practice medicine anymore........
The purpose is creating a hammer. "Yes, we can make your life miserable and your practice unprofitable if you don't do as you're told".
As someone who works in the field I can assure you this is bipartisan. The reimbursement gotcha game has been in full effect since the GHWB administration.
But who’s Congress?
This is not a new rule. It has been in the works since the 1990’s. How much of a waste of time it will be is still a question. Most doctors have coding people either at their offices or they contract with them so the burden will be on the coders to learn the new codes. Of course it will require clarification and back and forth so that will waste time.
ER personnel and other hospital doctors/ nurses do not look up the codes. Professional medical coders who are trained to interpret a hospital encounter into diagnosis(es), surgeries, procedures and other statistics “code” the chart.
also:I am a professional hospital medical coder. As much as I ABSOLUTELY HATE OCare: The new coding set (ICD-10) has been in the works long before OCare. Actually its implementation has been postponed twice already. A version of ICD-10 has been in use worldwide, except in the US, for quite a while. It was postponed due to the enormous expense to hospitals, doctor’s offices, insurance companies, and the US gov’t (medicare). The main problem now is that setting the start date of 10/1/14 on top of a mandated electronic record and the OCare milehigh stack of regulations,it will financially ruin many healthcare providers. The change from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10 is like changing from English to Russian. The codes, code fields, and root word definitions are changing. At my hospital, we are already spending hours and hours taking on-line courses to learn the new system. It is costing the hospital a lot of money; the IT (info technology) dept is also greatly impacted by this code set change.
So although OCare didn’t dream this up; it will help bankrupt and destroy our healthcare system.
Of course the US version, has many more codes than the international version. I haven’t check to see if there is a specific code for squirrel bite; but there has been codes for injuries caused by animals for years .Just gotta love those statistics. /sarc
BTW, there are codes for getting stabbed by knitting needles, while falling off a chair in an office....
I believe the MD puts diagnosis on their office form and a trained clerk fills out the right code at the time they bill the gov’t. Can u imagine having to learn all the codes. They have schools for that, and I wonder how much the clerks make.
Don’t forget - died by hanging while on a burning surfboard ...
You put bureaucrats who have never lived in the real world, nor ever held a real job with accountability, and the certain result is more paperwork. Mountains of it!
The primary job of all bureaucrats is to create more bureaucrats.
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