Duncan Guy wrote:
A colleague had a referral questioned
Was it questioned because the Medicare auditor thought that it looked possibly fraudulent, or was it just randomly chosen to be checked?
, he was able to provide a scanned
copy. The HIC snoops said that wasnt enough, he argued, it went back and forth with no ruling.
Note that Medicare did not try to prosecute your colleague. This is because they know that if they did so they would cause the federal health minister to have to spend a lot of time trying to explain to the public and to the profession why a specialist who had seen a referred patient and who had reasonable evidence of the referral was being hounded at a time when we are trying to get more doctors into practice, not fewer.
In the end he rang the GP concerned and asked if a duplicate referral could be issued, this was done and HIC was happy
This is clearly the most sensible and fastest way to resolve any question of whether a referral was made - ask the referring doctor whether he or she did in fact refer the patient and to show a copy of that referral.
So no resolution to the issue of scanning,
I think that the case that you have quoted is resolution enough. Scan away to your heart's content.
-- Oliver Frank, general practitioner 255 North East Road, Hampstead Gardens, South Australia 5086 Phone 08 8261 1355 Fax 08 8266 5149 Mobile 0407 181 683 _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
