Access airs concerns while staff get lunch
Physician offices stay in the loop
A monthly luncheon for physician offices hosted by Morton Plant Mease Hospital in Safety Harbor, FL, offers a forum for access concerns and helps smooth relationships between hospital and physician, says Cathy Tammaro, CHAM, manager of patient access services. "If I have something new in access to share, or something they’re not doing the right way, or want to praise them for doing something perfectly, I can do that," Tammaro adds. "We fill out a comment sheet every few months with hot topic ideas."
Get everyone together
One of the positive results of the luncheons — reinstituted near the beginning of 2001 after having been discontinued some years back — has been the ability to put a face with a voice or a name, she says. "If I’m arguing on the phone with some lady named Ann and then I meet that person, we have a tendency to be softer to one another. We’re building relationships."
The meetings are held from noon to 1 p.m., the hospital provides lunch, and attendees may be office managers or front-desk supervisors, Tammaro notes. "We try to get someone there who sets standards." The person in charge of physician relations and special projects for Morton Plant Mease and another smaller hospital in the Baycare health system chairs the meeting, she says. Baycare’s larger hospital hosts its own office manager luncheon, Tammaro adds.
"The hospital will let them know what we’re doing — that we have a construction project to add 100 beds, for example, or that we’ve made headlines for something," she says. Guest speakers from different areas of the hospital cover a wide range of topics, Tammaro says, from infection control to ergonomic evaluations. Office managers "feel like they’re being kept in the loop."
When she stands up at the meeting to speak on behalf of access services, as she often does, Tammaro says, she is careful "not to pick on one office," but to make her comments general. "I’ll say that we’re getting prescriptions without a diagnosis, or with a diagnosis that doesn’t meet medical necessity," she adds, "or tell them that sometimes they’re giving us codes when we need words. We go over things like that."
In some cases, Tammaro smoothes the way for an access policy, such as the requirement that ultrasounds will be cancelled if authorization isn’t obtained the day before. "I ask them how I can make it easier" for the physician offices to comply," she says. "It seems to be working, but not every physician’s staff comes, so we still have problem offices."
(Editor’s note: Look for more example of how access managers are gaining cooperation from physicians’ offices in the next issue of Hospital Access Management.)
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