I’ll make this one very short. The same realities apply in the CMS documentation, coding, and billing rules that incentivize over-treating as they do for over-testing.

If I see a patient with a cough, I don’t prescribe antibiotics, and I give the long speech explaining why they don’t need antibiotics, and I reassure the patient that he is doing everything right — just be patient, chest colds can last up to a month — Medicare says that’s worth about $40 ($28 for Medicaid). If I prescribe antibiotics, now that visit is worth $100, if I jump through a few more documentation hoops, which means I write down a bunch of meaningless details that serve only to appease Medicare. They clearly don’t improve the quality of care.

It’s all so wrong.

This entry was posted on July 22, 2014 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.