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Less than 30% of patient access areas use patient liability estimator software, but this software is necessary to ensure patient satisfaction with growing numbers of underinsured and self-pay patients. Decide which tool will work best with your patient accounting or patient management system. Incorporate ability to pay functions and a presumptive charity care screen. Develop good financial policies for pre-registration and patient advocacy.
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At times, patients face lengthy wait times due to missing or invalid orders in registration areas. These long waits decrease satisfaction scores for patient access. Educate provider offices on situations in which patients were inconvenienced. Have physicians use online scheduling, which requires ICD9 and diagnosis codes. Scan orders so they can be located online.
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Like many patient access leaders, Linaka Kain, DE, a disability examiner and Medicaid specialist at Trinity Regional Health System Rock Island, IL, is expecting a large influx of newly eligible patients coming on to the Medicaid program as a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2014.
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At the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange in Carson City, NV, workers have been counting down the days until Oct. 1 on an office corkboard, according to a report in Kaiser Health News.1 Now it is only days to the deadline for opening the online marketplaces that are a linchpin of the federal health law known as Obamacare, the report said.
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"Churn when otherwise-eligible Medicaid beneficiaries are disenrolled and re-enrolled in the program is a frequent problem and will continue to be so under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), according to Benjamin D. Sommers, MD, PhD, assistant professor of health policy and economics at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.
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As a bioethicist, is your approach too theoretical or removed from the practical issues that face clinicians?
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If an undocumented patient presents to an emergency department, the hospital will likely meet its obligations to stabilize the patient as required by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, but what happens after that?
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There is an enormous disparity between the number of patients with end-stage organ failure and the number of organs available for transplantation, resulting in patients dying on the waiting list, according to Christie P. Thomas, MD, professor in the Division of Nephrology at University of Iowa Health Care in Iowa City and chair of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Networks (OPTN) Living Donor Committee.
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Obesity may be the most difficult and elusive public health problem this country has ever encountered, according to a 2013 Hastings Center Report.
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Hospital ethics committees can place the care of undocumented patients on their discussion agenda periodically, and can facilitate discussions about this issue during medical or interdisciplinary grand rounds, according to a 2013 report.
