Wiki Hospital charges....help!!!

[erlinger58@sbcglobal.net]

Wondering how other offices bill for the physicians hospital charges (family practice)? Does your Doc bring in his notes each day for you to code the level of service? Or does your Physician just tell you what level of service to code from? Also, in order to code for hospital visits does the office not need copies of his notes to be kept at the office??

 

[syllingk]

Both my general surgeons keep a book that I can go and look at anytime. One uses the hospital visit stickers and the other just writes the date,name and what he did and who referred and I go and look them up in the hospital system and code from there.

 

[MarcusM]

For one set of doctors, we used colored index cards to identify each doctor, and they would take 4-5 to fit in their shirt pocket to jot down patient name, procedure and anything else that was pertinent. We trained them to turn these in every time they came to clinic. I had one pediatrician just take HCFA copies, and he would jot down the information in the blocks which made it easy to bill out. The point is to use some type of tickler system and train the doctors to turn in their homework.

 

[MarcusM]

Also, on hospital documentation going back to the office. If the patient follows up in your office, then the hospital documents go into the chart. If not, I would just keep an expandable file, A-Z, and put the hospital documents there. If your doctor sees a lot of hospital patients, may want to use a monthly folder, A-Z so you can easily find the documents.

 

[Pam Warren]

At the time of admission, a charge capture document is included with all of our admission paperwork. This is placed in the patient's paper chart; and all of our employed physicians use it for documenting their DOS and service level. It's not foolproof, but they kept losing the cards.

We are transitioning to an electronic charge capture product called PatientKeeper.