Hello Fellow Broward Health physician,
As most of you are aware, our new standardized contracts with Broward Health penalize our salary if proper billing and coding is not entered properly 95% of the time. Depending on your specialty, this places 23-40% of your salary at risk. Doctors Choice has likely come to your office and provided sham (or real) audits of your documentation and billing to assist you in meeting this contractual requirement. However, many of us feel that we should not be penalized for this as we are not certified in coding and billing we further feel that our ability to deliver quality patient care is compromised by the time and distraction of providing the hospital with billing and coding services ourselves. If you share in this sentiment, please electronically sign the petition letter below requesting BH to provide certified billers and coders to all staff physicians.
To view petition content, click "Read petition letter" below.
To sign, click "sign petition" in right column.
STAFF PHYSICIAN PETITION FOR CERTIFIED BILLING/CODING SERVICESThe Staff Physicians of Broward Health whose signatures appear below request certified billing and coding services to ensure complete and accurate claims are submitted to all payers we participate in. In this petition, as a united physician group with Broward Health, we find that our medical professional time and quality of care is currently being compromised and distracted by billing, coding documentation (required to substantiate the various levels of Evaluation and Management Guidelines (E/M)) responsibilities. We recognize the legal, valid and worthwhile need for accuracy in billing and coding and want to be compliant with the Office of Inspector General (OIG), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and commercial payer guidelines. Given the level of exposure to billing, coding and documentation guidelines provided us over the years, we feel that we lack the competency to fulfill the requirements of OIG and CMS guidelines despite the training sessions provided by Broward Health. Coding and billing are daunting tasks necessitating full understanding of OIG Compliance requirements as outined in the Federal Register and documented in the ICD-10, HCPCS II and CPT manuals. We note that each of these resources is continuously evolving, contain numerous new, revised and deleted entries and thus require continuous education to comprehend. These resources are comprised of more than 4,000 pages of text including references to additional texts and resources, include more than 14,000 codes for billing, 10,000 CPT service and procedure codes and 69,000 ICD-10 codes. Due to the voluminous nature of billing and coding guidelines, CMS, commercial payers, the IRS, AMA and AOA recognize billing and coding as independent professions from the practice of medicine. Certification in coding takes a minimum of 1 year full time education online and 2 years for an AA degree. Certification in billing takes a minimum of 6 weeks full time education. The staff physicians of Broward Health recognize that we lack the time and resources to fully comprehend and implement coding and billing practices to the level necessary to ensure compliance with all governmental and payer guidelines. By our signatures upon this document we respectfully request that all of our billing and coding be provided by Broward Health and agree to provide documentation of patient encounters and procedures which are comprehensive and accurate to enable such coding and billing to be performed efficiently.
