Friday 2 September 2011

Primary Healthcare: A Critical Reassessment in the Changing Healthcare Scenario

The Primary Health Care (PHC) system in the US has so far served as a platform for providing frontline care with services provided by medical professionals ranging from family physicians and assistants, internal medicine specialists, nursing practitioners and clinicians.
However, the diversity in patient backgrounds and medical needs of individuals, special needs patients (e.g. disabled persons or community crisis victims) along with the wide spectrum of the care demanded can take a toll on veteran medical experts, so it’s quite easy to imagine what newly qualified PHC professionals or facilities have to deal with.
PHC Burnout Reasons Regarded as the quarterback of primary patient care, clinicians have issues of performing at optimum levels consistently, since they are the first point of contact for health problems that have so far not been diagnosed, have the responsibility of providing comprehensive personal care and also building long-term relationships with patients who come in with chronic problems.
Now, add to these duties, the necessity of effectively coordinating across multiple sectors for ensuring health services offered at their clinic are customized for all patients, in the correct setting and provided by the most appropriate medical expert in keeping with a patient’s values and it is easy to understand why PHC professionals are often stressed and overworked.
PHC professionals have to manage key stakeholders, such as employees, legislators and patients in addition to their increasing workload, with fewer trainees and support care personnel available to meet with rising demands of quality primary healthcare and strict government policies.
Having to further work within the narrow confines of antiquated administrative systems of Primary Health care delivery further debilitates PHC providers.
PHC providers need efficient, measurable and guaranteed systems for integrating different primary care disciplines so they can ensure advanced support, adequate community networking and improved primary care services for a wide range of patients – without having to commit hands-on time or labor for transforming their practice.
Solutions For Growing Primary Health Care Services Learning about new models of PHC, latest clinical innovations, exposure to the latest billing and coding software, having access to reformed curriculums and medical billing and coding systems that augment the nature of services provided by Primary health care professionals are some ways of solving the problems of burned out physicians specializing in PHC. However, it may not be practical for many Primary Health Care practitioners to personally handle all of these issues or even acquire trained, dedicated and experienced staff in-house to manage competencies needed for enhanced primary care without significantly affecting revenue.
Here is where outsourcing certain competencies to specialized medical billing and coding companies and firms trained to provide expert administrative support services to medical practitioners, clinics and healthcare centers can play an important role in transforming the way medical care is provided. In addition to the growing number of patients a PHC provider or organization serves, the government adds more duties through laws and regulations, making this burden even heavier especially on the primary healthcare professional, the first-contact medical help provider.
Though government initiatives are aimed at reducing the patients’ burden by providing Medicare and Medicaid to improve the quality of service – via enforcement of PQRS (Physician Quality Reporting Service), setting up and maintenance of Electronic Health Record (EHS) systems – these additional regulations and procedures place an extra burden on the physician. They involve setup costs, maintenance, staff and training etc. -facts that should be considered seriously by PHC providers keen to build credibility without neglecting revenue optimization for their practice.
PQRS requires doctors to report to a particular set of Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) and Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes. This is no easy task, since PQRS helps the physician gain credibility in his or her work sphere, but the cost implications far outweigh this advantage for most PHC providers. Sourcing support staff or training existing staff to use this new and complex technology can be time-consuming and a drain on resources.
However, using the services of professionals like Medicalbillersandcoders.com to hire skilled CPC certified coders and CCHIT certified-software can help the physicians to focus on quality of patient care by PQRS participation while these experts ensure a healthy revenue generation for the organization.
Specialist medical billing and coding firms such as medicalbillersandcoders.com cater to individual professionals as well as large hospitals. HIPAA compliancy, insurance pre-authorization, denial management and appeals, account receivables, as well as customized consultancy services for optimizing revenue cycle management – you name it and their team members are certified and well equipped to handle every administration duty you can think of!
So, if you are a Primary Care Physician jostling with hundreds of changes in the healthcare industry and want to optimize your revenue, click www.medicalbillersandcoders.com to learn more!
For more information visit: Cleveland Medical Billing, Charlotte Medical Billing, Chicago Medical Billing

No comments:

Post a Comment