Wiki Discharge services

[amberlarsen820]

I work for 10 physicians and am trying to clean up the billing and coding at the practice.

My doctors cover for each other at the hospital on the weekends.

When we are the attending, and a patient is discharged over the weekend, the covering doctor will not do the discharge summary. They wait until the attending gets back, and then the attending will do the D/C summary. I don't think they can do this. This would be billing for services that provider didn't provide. I also cannot bill under the doctor that actually saw the patient because if "it isn't documented, it didn't happen."

Does anyone have any advice on this topic or an easy way to explain this? I explained all this a month ago and I now have 2 physicians that are still doing it the old way. I have told them it will not get billed, but I am not sure they understand this!

 

[snjberry]

The doctor that actually discharged the patient needs to dictate the note and reference that patient's primary provider is ABC and to send him a copy of current dictation. You are correct...providers can't bill something they didn't do. It's a liability for the facility in question. Believe me...patients are paying attention and they know when a different provider see's them under any circumstance.
I would express your concerns to your supervisor, and or the providers in question. This needs to be communicated to management and be corrected. Auditors don't accept I didn't know, I didn't do such and such on purpose, or I thought we could do that...It's still fraud to them.
Good catch.