Wiki Inpatient Physician Charge Capture

[Pam Warren]

Hi, I wanted to shout out to my coding colleagues and survey you on how you collect your charge capture information from your physicians when they see patients in the facility? Do you use billing cards? Smart Phone applications like Patient Keeper or Ingenious Med? Do they use CPOE? Do your coders audit the charts to capture charges? Management Reports?

We're in transition...having done most of these methods above with varying levels of success. Does anyone have a foolproof plan?

Thanks everyone, and have a great week. Pam

 

[Pam Warren]

Anyone?

 

[kevbshields]

Pam:

I could talk to you about how we've accomplished this inside facilities that code for their physicians. That might be a different intent and scenario that what you have, but for us it boiled down to record abstraction by a certified coder. Shoot me an email if we should talk about that further.

kevbshields@yahoo.com

Good luck & happy holidays.

 

[FTessaBartels]

Our practice

Our practice is part of a large academic medical center. No, the phsycians are NOT employees of the hospital, but are intimately connected to the hospital. All our "office visits" are, in fact, performed in hospital clinics. All that is just background ...

TO answer your specific question ...
For most of our inpatient charges our billing office employes inpatient abstractors who read every inpatient chart and abstract all the charges.

If the physician goes "off campus" to perform a service (our pediatric surgeons visit other hospitals with NICU's to consult or even perform surgery there) ... we require that the physician communicate that to us in some fashion. Some keep a log on their smart phones, some bring back a copy of the patient face sheet with a notation of what they did, some give us a piece of paper with a scribble on it ... in all these cases, we then contact the hospital and request the relevant medical records, abstract the charges and submit.

Hope that helps.

F Tessa Bartels, CPC, CEMC