Word: emres
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...doctor with a sore knee and for some reason he is examining your ears. It might be that you have a very thorough doctor who is ruling out a rare ear-knee syndrome. More likely, the EMR program he bought is reminding him that notes on the chart about just few more body parts will kick your visit up into a higher-paying code...
...EMR makes money in ways like this, using cleverly designed "thought bins" that are put into the program by profit-maximizing, code-savvy administrators. EMR can inject more higher-paying codes into our patient contact and squeeze that much more money out of it - quite innocently too. It is, after all, a computer forcing these choices...
...EMR, financially, is the mouth and esophagus of a hungrier billing animal. And not just in hospital practice. Private medical practices, whose incomes have been driven down over the years by decreasing insurance reimbursements, are hiring computerized record/billing companies in droves. Their promise? To create electronic medical records that comply completely with coding requirements. This way the practice can bill more and improve its bottom line, even after paying the billing company for its services, which run 6 to 10 percent of gross. The insurers got computers so the doctors are getting them too. It's an arms race - though...
...hospitals and big clinics think they can make more money with EMR, why then does everyone from the President on down believe that computerized medicine will help contain costs rather than inflate them? Is it simply that better medicine should be cheaper in the long run and having all that information available should make for better medicine...
...EMR has the potential to greatly increase insurance company denials of the tests and treatments that doctors order. In the old days, the tests we ordered were done first - though bills for them might not get paid. Now when findings aren't bad enough to "justify" expensive tests or treatments, (according to sources chosen by - you guessed it - insurance companies) the computer tells everyone, immediately, "you're going to eat this." Might this eliminate unnecessary testing and save money? Sure. But who determines what is necessary? Who should a patient trust to make her medical decisions? Can the government...