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The Access Center is the first contact that a referring physician has with the hospital, notes Bob Potter, RN, manager of access and preadmissions at University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. "The first impression is the lasting impression," he says. "Customer service is our sole reason for existing."
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Just a couple of years ago, registrars in the emergency department (ED) at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington collected only $100 to $1,000 a month in copays.
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Payers are asking for more authorizations for high-dollar radiology procedures, and claims denials are resulting, reports Stephen Hovan, executive director of patient fiscal services at The University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, who adds that his department is seeing a 75% increase in authorizations for radiology processes.
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Registrars at Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte, NC, benefit from "tricks of the trade" shared by specialists within the department, reports Christina Baugh, supervisor of PRN registrars and patient financial service specialists for corporate patient access.
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Would you consider one-year-old uncollected account with a large outstanding balance to be a lost cause that ultimately will need to be written off?
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Effective communication is critical to the successful delivery of healthcare services. The Joint Commission supports a number of efforts to improve communication between healthcare professionals and patients.
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A patient should be educated with several topics when diagnosed with asthma, says Marc Riedl, MD, assistant professor of medicine, Division of Clinical Immunology and Allergy at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. They include the following:
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At the University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) in Seattle, educators ask inpatients how they prefer to learn and document that information on the electronic medical record, when there is no protocol for accommodating the patients' preferences. These actions are futile, members of the Patient and Family Education Committee complain.
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Children's Medical Center in Dallas found families were making repeated visits to the emergency department seeking treatment for a child with an asthma attack. These children were being admitted to the hospital repeatedly. To address the problem, the Asthma Management Program was initiated in 2001.
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The Library of Non-Traditional Patient Education Tools is an ongoing project hosted by Patient and Family Education Services at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. It is an ongoing tracking system of educational tools to teach patients of various learning styles such as hearing, seeing, and hands-on.
