Have you noticed that health care has taken a back seat to billing? Coding medical services using the appropriate number from the code book must be done to bill. The possible codes expand from around the current 13,000 to over 110,000 next year. Guess who has the time to look up the codes?
NO ONE!
Unless resources are diverted away from clinical care and personal energies are diverted away from patients. If you've been in a hospital, you've felt it. When the nurse wants to hold your hand for comfort, she/he can't because they have to hold onto the bar-code reader. Yes, folks, the nurses are now billers, too.
WHY?
MONEY!
One way to redirect some of these misguided energies: Family Medicine should secede from the money-sucking, misguided insurance driven non-system of health care and endorse/practice Direct Family Medicine or a similar Direct Primary Care strategy.
Get the bar-code readers out of the hands of health care professionals. Caring is more important than billing.
Yes, business is important, billing is important, coding is important, AFTER patient care and the patient-physician relationship are addressed.
What do you think?
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