Word: patiently
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SEPT. 3 A phone call from Joe Robbins, a Duke financial coordinator, to Jackie Brown, PHP's transplant coordinator, was the first anyone at the insurance company knew of Hunter's whereabouts. Both recognized that the patient was "out of network," but it would be weeks before anyone would sort out how it was that Hunter ended up in a hospital with no plan to pay for an operation that could cost anywhere from $80,000, if the procedure went smoothly, to perhaps $1 million, if complications arose. The precipitating error apparently took place in the back offices of MUSC...
Hepatologist Trotter told Richard O'Connor, PHP's medical director, that Hunter was too sick to travel. O'Connor replied that the patient could stay at Duke through the weekend, but if he stabilized during that time, PHP wanted him flown to Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Tuesday. O'Connor also told Trotter, according to the insurer, that if Hunter's condition worsened over the weekend, Duke was "authorized" to perform a transplant...
...make deals," Tuttle said. "I'm going to take care of him. He's my patient." As of Tuesday night, however, there was no liver in sight, and time was running...
...lingers on. PHP insists that it told Duke it would pay. But pay what? "They made an offer," says Robbins. "But they never agreed to pay the hospital bill." PHP fires back that anyone in the business knows that if an insurer "authorizes" a procedure, it means the patient is no longer liable, the hospital will get paid--something. Complicating this particular case is the fact that URN, PHP's liver carrier, has been negotiating with Duke over a liver-capitation deal for months, and neither side wants an individual case to take control of that process...
...that was easy. But the benefits of computerizing some nurse's duties are literally incalculable. Instead of writing charts by hand, a nurse can now type data into a computer. Or a nurse can press a button on a computer connected to the heart monitor of a patient down the hall and get up-to-the-second readings on heart rate, blood pressure and temperature without leaving her station. Yet the hospital has not reduced its nursing staff. Instead, nurses who once spent 60% of their time doing paperwork now spend that 60% at bedsides, giving patients personal attention. Sick...