Sometimes you can’t win for losing as this video shows what happened in Texas, the ER docs were instructed to bring up admissions if they could on marginal cases, so they did, and the reward was getting fired when the business intelligence software said some were not necessary, so this is a double edge sword we have going here and who’s going to be the Monday morning quarterbacks? BD
He describes the case of a woman with a probable case of lung cancer who needed a comprehensive evaluation. She was on Medicaid, the government health insurance for the poor, which meant she’d have a hard time finding specialists to treat her as an outpatient. So Pines admitted her to the hospital, even though she wasn’t acutely ill.
“She was not sick enough to need a hospital bed,” he writes. “But I believe admitting her was the right decision.”
Health Blog Questions of the Day: Who should decide when hospital admissions are necessary? Are there any instances where public insurance shouldn’t pay for a hospital admission?
An ER Doc Grapples With ‘Unnecessary’ Hospital Admissions - Health Blog – WSJ
Related Reading:
Closing the Chemotherapy/Outpatient Clinic In Las Vegas and nowhere to go – University Medical Center
Consolidation in Health Insurance Carriers – Who will be the king of risk management?
Desperate Hospitals – March 2009 Update
Desperate Hospitals – February 2009 Update
Desperate Hospitals – Updated November 21, 2008
Desperate Hospitals – September 2008