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Several "missed opportunity" areas for copay collection are receiving close attention at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, CT, reports Margaret Trudel, patient access manager.
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At Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, CT, members of the patient access staff have been collecting ED copays since 2004, reports Margaret Trudel, patient access manager, "but we continue to make adjustments to improve." Previously, about 12% of identified copays were collected at the hospital's main ED, Trudel says.
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(Editor's Note: This is the second part of a two-part series on patient identification processes used by patient access departments. This month, we report on new biometric technology being implemented by a growing number of hospitals. Last month, we covered processes used to verify a patient's identity, the expected impact of healthcare reform, and involving patients in the process.)
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When biometric scanning was introduced at Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte, NC, registrars handed out marketing and informational material to all patients.
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If you don't have a robust clinical documentation improvement program implemented by highly trained staff, your hospital might find itself in trouble in more ways than one.
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A few years ago, it was a common practice for case managers to be responsible for clinical documentation improvement along with their other duties, but that should no longer be the case, according to Toni Cesta, RN, PhD, FAAN, senior vice president, operational efficiency and capacity management at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, and partner and consultant in Dallas-based Case Management Concepts, a case management consulting firm.
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As a result of a pre-billing review of charts of patients who die in the hospital, the mortality index at Stony Brook University Medical Center has remained steady at under 1 except for one month when it was 1.04, according to Catherine Morris, RN, MS, CCM, CMAC, executive director of care management and clinical documentation improvement administrator at the 591-bed medical center in Stony Brook, NY.
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Case managers are likely to have additional duties added to their workload under a proposed rule issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that would require providers to formally notify Medicare beneficiaries of their right to communicate concerns about the quality of the care they received to the state Quality Improvement Organization (QIO).
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As reform helps more Americans gain access to health coverage, experts predict that the nation's EDs will be bulging at the seams.
