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Although tuberculosis has reached an all-time low in the United States, the persistence of TB globally including extensively drug-resistant (XDR)-TB means that U.S. hospitals must remain vigilant to prevent spread of the disease, public health experts say.
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Patient access departments are, without question, "under the microscope" in this recession. Managers need to prove their competency and show the impact of the department on the hospital's bottom line, while facing the threat of budget cuts that could reduce staffing, technology, and education resources.
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Use data to deflect unfair complaints about accessWhen someone has a complaint about patient access either an individual staff person or the department overall how you respond can "make or break" what happens next.
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An ancillary department repeatedly insists that patient access staff are entering the wrong orders. If this accusation was made about your department, what would your response be?
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Do you want to discourage staff, send a registrar's morale plummeting, and as a result, deal with higher turnover in your department? If not, don't make these morale-busting mistakes:
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Although workflow management is not a new phenomena in the business world, it is relatively new in revenue cycle operations, especially in patient access operations, says John Woerly, RHIA, CHAM, senior manager at Accenture in Indianapolis.
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Joan S. Braveman, director of patient access and financial services at Tallahassee (FL) Memorial HealthCare, says that her department is in the process of doing "complete re-education" on the Medicare Secondary Payer questionnaire.
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The credibility of "dueling experts" testifying before a jury often determines the outcome of a lawsuit alleging malpractice by an emergency physician, but in fact, expert witnesses typically get involved weeks before a case is even filed.
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Historically, emergency department (ED) triage was rarely a high-risk issue for hospitals, primarily because short waiting times resulted in all patients being seen quickly by the emergency physicians. Today, the combination of overcrowding, markedly prolonged waiting times, increasing numbers of patients leaving the ED before examination, the nursing shortage, diminishing financial support, and federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) mandates make triage a very dangerous encounter for the patient and a fertile source of litigation against providers.
