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New guidelines available from the American Health Lawyers Association (AHLA) codify the many issues to discuss and decisions to make when a healthcare facility is considering disclosure of a serious clinical adverse event (SCAE).
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Will my insurance cover this visit?" is something patients often ask registrars in the emergency department at Sutter Delta Medical Center in Antioch, CA. However, the answer isn't as simple as it seems.
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A patient wasn't happy with the answer she received after asking registrars at Botsford Hospital in Farmington Hills, MI, the cost of a high-dollar procedure, and she insisted that she could get it performed for half of the price quoted.
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Not long ago, a registrar would assume a patient was providing accurate information, only to find out the claim was denied due to incorrect insurance, reports Michelle M. Mohrbach, CHAM, manager of patient access and central scheduling at Blanchard Valley Health System in Findlay, OH.
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Because the findings were unclear on an abdominal and pelvic sonogram performed for a patient at Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth, TX, the radiologist performed a CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis with contrast, but this additional test hadn't been authorized by the payer.
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Many patients are accustomed to receiving text messages from friends, retailers, and workplaces, and they probably expect to be able to receive texts from you.
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Until recently, members of the patient access staff at St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, NY, were assigned a generic "customer service representative" title that didn't reflect what they actually did.
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Under the plan proposed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), patients and their relatives would report medical errors and near misses through a web site and in telephone interviews.
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In response to news about a possible program that would encourage patients to report medical errors, eight U.S. congressmen wrote to Carolyn Clancy, MD, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, to express their concerns.
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The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) has posed liability risks for hospitals for many years, but EMTALA obligations have been limited mainly to the emergency department (ED). Now a recent decision by a federal district court in Texas suggests that the law could be applied much more broadly to inpatients as well.
