I hail from the RSA - over the last 8 years they have gradually introduced the ICD10 condes for clinical data and ? CPT coding for billing. It was finally introduced this year and is enforced in that the Private Medical Insurers (No State Medicare system) will reject any claim for services if this coding is not in place. Patients are mostly not allowed by their insurers to pay cash and then claim back so doctors are forced to spend immense effort on coding correctly. In addition they have to phone and get permission everytime they do procedures such as pap smears. Lastly there are limited funds within each financial year for acute services, hospital services, acute meds, chronic meds, etc. If you as a GP want to make sure you are going to get paid you make sure you phone and verify what funds are left each time before you see a patient.
I somehow don't think the average Ozzie GP will be willing (? able) to cope with this BS -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Les Ferguson Sent: Thursday, 20 July 2006 12:39 PM To: General Practice Computing Group Talk Subject: RE: Re: [GPCG_TALK] SNOMED Project Proposal From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Cedric Meyerowitz "Again I ask the question: Were all the current software companies contacted & informed & feed back sought about this ?" As for being informed, they should have been paying attention to this sort of thing anyway, if Health IT is their chosen area of, erm, excellence. On the feed back issue, I would prefer the opinions of those who use the coding systems, and especially those that get value out of using them, over the views of the software vendors. As has been said recently, many don't even see a need to encode their notes, when a bit of free text will do. That really comes back to how much IT understanding or expectations a person has, or more appropriately, how far that person is prepared to extend or go out of their way to adapt to a digital format of concise data elements. At least if one methodology is accepted as the standard for the country, those that are currently reluctant to take up such rigidity over free text may start to see more validity in coding, with the removal of that area of doubt over which method is better than the other. -- Les Ferguson Business Analyst Medtech Software Ltd Auckland, New Zealand _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
