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Over the past several years, patients repeatedly told registrars at Bay Care Health System a Tampa, FL-based system consisting of 11 not-for-profit hospitals, outpatient facilities, and services that they were concerned about medical identity theft. They didn't want to provide sensitive identifying information, such as Social Security number, each time they accessed the facility.
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It sounds fairly cut and dried: If an authorization isn't obtained from a payer, the claim will be denied. However, payer requirements are getting more and more complex and stringent.
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Without question, the mistakes made by front-end staff can make or break the success of your patient access department. "Registration is one of the important components of patient care," says Debra A. Artwell, manager of outpatient access at Pennsylvania Hospital, part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. "The patient demographics and financial information are data that follow the patient throughout our entire health system."
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If a patient becomes upset about the amount he or she will owe, Joseph Ianelli, senior financial manager of Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital's admitting department, says that the message patient access staff want to give is: "There is something we can do for you. We want you to get the medical care you need."
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Are you certain the patient's insurance is actually active? The earlier in the process you learn this information, the more likely you are to avoid bad debt.
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Uncollectible funds, or "bad debt," is a problem your patient access department can't afford to ignore. With increasing numbers of self-pay, uninsured, and underinsured patients access managers should revamp processes sooner rather than later.
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Thanks to safer devices, health care workers are sustaining many fewer needlesticks than they did a decade ago. But hospitals have yet to face up to the challenge of one unsafe zone: The operating room.
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The Joint Commission's longstanding patient safety goal on infection prevention underscores the critical importance of improving hand hygiene compliance by health care providers. Moreover, again in 2010, the Joint Commission urges infection preventionists and their colleagues to foster "a culture of hand hygiene" by monitoring compliance and providing feedback.
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As the novel H1N1 influenza began to spread last year, emergency department workers were at greater risk of infection than workers in other departments, according to a study at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.
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Hospital employees stepped up for influenza vaccinations at an unprecedented rate this year, but there was just one catch: Many of them received the seasonal flu vaccine but not the H1N1 vaccine.
