Teen program puts focus on confidentiality
December 1, 1999 2 minutes read
Teen program puts focus on confidentiality
Special billing practices used
"Sensitive Services," a program handled by access personnel at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Stanford Healthcare, focuses on patient confidentiality.
Aimed at protecting the privacy of teen-agers seeking services they don’t want their parents to know about, "Sensitive Services" is administered by the state through MediCal, California’s version of Medicaid, says Robin Hanson, manager of registration services for UCSF Stanford’s north campus in San Francisco.
Until late September, registration for the program took place in the main admitting area, but it is now done by administrative personnel at the facility’s teen clinic, Hanson says. The registrars in the main admitting area, who handle some 200 registrations a day, she notes, "are more likely to remember how to do it."
After the teen-ager has been screened, but before provision of the service — which might be treatment for venereal disease or termination of pregnancy — he or she completes a MediCal application, she adds.
Then the patient is registered, Hanson says, with these important variations from the normal process:
• There is a special patient type code.
• No guarantor information is included.
• No insurance information is included.
• The mailing address is the hospital’s accounts receivable department, to make sure the bill never gets out the door.
A weekly report is generated that includes all accounts with this patient type to make sure they have been done correctly, she says, and that no bills are inadvertently sent to a patient’s home.
Once the application has been sent to MediCal and returned, the computer system is updated so the hospital can bill MediCal, Hanson says. "If MediCal denied coverage for any reason, the bill is written off, but I don’t remember that ever happening."
Despite the safeguards, there have been "a couple of slip-ups," she adds, in cases where the pediatrics clinic handled the registration. "About a year ago," Hanson says, "a mother came into the pediatrics department demanding to know what service her child had received."
An advantage to handling Sensitive Services registrations in the pediatrics clinic, on the other hand, is that the patient can stay in one place, Hanson says. "They don’t have to shuttle back and forth. Since eligibility has to be renewed every month, it makes sense to have it all in one place."
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