Decoding Upcoding in the Emergency Department
In a webinar on Wednesday presented by the Center for Health Journalism called “It’s the Prices, Stupid: How Sky High Prices are Crippling Our Healthcare System,” Sarah Kliff, the senior policy correspondent for Vox discussed a recent article about hidden “facility fees” included in emergency department (ED) billing. Kliff’s article, “Emergency rooms are Monopolies: Patients pay the price,” profiles a patient who visited his local ED for severe back pain. He was given a muscle relaxant and discharged quickly. His bill, however, was $2,429.84—seemingly disproportionately high in comparison with the care he received. In today’s webinar, Kliff mentioned another Vox reader who sent her his ED bill, which totaled $629. In this case, the individual took his daughter to an ED after his wife trimmed their daughter’s fingernail too close to the skin. The ED charged the parents $7 for one Band-Aid. A murky “facility fee” was the remaining charge and became the subject of a year-long Vox investigation into emergency department billing.
Kliff described how, through social media outreach, she was able to collect medical bills from over 600 people in 48 states to create a database of ED bills that patients wanted decoded for them. Vox and Kliff worked with HIPAA experts for over a month to create a secure database that could properly protect the volunteers’ protected health information (PHI). Then, they created a network of experts, including ED coders and billers, doctors, nurses, and payers to consult with to help explain the CPT codes and itemized charges on patient claims.
Kliff has been working with the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) and its president, Niall Brennan—formerly the chief data officer at CMS—to study ED cost trends.
According to Brennan’s data and Vox’s investigation, nebulous “facility fee” charges are the unpublished price of walking into any given ED, regardless of the services provided. Hospitals say it’s the price they must charge to keep their doors open, Kliff found.
“Overall spending on emergency room fees rose by more than $3 billion between 2009 and 2015, despite the fact the HCCI database shows a slight (2 percent) decline in the number of emergency room fees billed in the same time period,” Vox reported.
In response to soaring overall healthcare costs, HCCI’s data found that coding professionals and hospital billers are being pressured to essentially upcode ED claims. Hospitals are increasingly using level 4 and level 5 codes—the highest levels available—to bill for basic services. For example, Kliff cites one man who knew he had strep throat but couldn’t find an open urgent care center, so he visited a local ED. The doctor prescribed IV antibiotics and inexplicably ordered a CT scan. His claim was coded at the highest level—a 5—the same as a serious auto accident injury. The ED charged a $1,900 facility fee.According to Brennan’s data, this scenario was not atypical.
Brennan and Kliff were not optimistic that healthcare costs would improve in 2018.
“2018 will be a year of consistent uncertainty. Moving away from putting all our chips on value-based care. Programs being cancelled or rolled back,” Brennan said during the Q&A portion of the webinar.
Kliff encourages consumers to call their providers about irregularities in their healthcare claims.
“About half of the bills in our database have charge data breakdowns. A lot are much more general. I’ve found hospitals when asked for itemized bills, that hospitals like to provide that information, but that’s not always the case. One of the things you have a right to do is ask the hospital for detailed information. That’s a place to start if it’s not on the bill already,” Kliff said.
[author] [author_image timthumb='on']/Portals/0/uploads/content_hub/Mary-Butler-Portrait.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Mary Butler is the associate editor at The Journal of AHIMA.[/author_info] [/author]