Billing for health care

Health Affairs has just published a great article on the administrative burden of billing for health care. From the article abstract:

The U.S. system of billing third parties for health care services is complex, expensive, and inefficient. Physicians end up using nearly 12 percent of their net patient service revenue to cover the costs of excessive administrative complexity. A single transparent set of payment rules for multiple payers, a single claim form, and standard rules of submission, among other innovations, would reduce the burden on the billing offices of physician organizations. On a national scale, our hypothetical modeling of these changes would translate into $7 billion of savings annually for physician and clinical services.

Click here to access the HA article (free full text!).

April issue of The ACCME Report

is now online. Check out this informative missive by clicking here.

CMSS Voluntary Code of Ethics for Interaction with Industry

From the CMSS's press release:

The Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS) today announced the release of the CMSS Code for Interactions with Companies. The code provides detailed guidance to medical specialty societies on appropriate interactions with for-profit companies in the health care sector. The voluntary code is designed to ensure that societies’ interactions with companies are independent and transparent, and advance medical care for the benefit of patients and populations. CMSS represents 32 leading medical professional societies, with a collective membership of more than 650,000 U.S. physicians.

Click here to access the press release. Click here to access the code.

Resources on CME

Check out the Top 50 Continuing Medical Education Blogs as defined by Nurse E.D.U. by clicking here. And, gosh, thank you!

The power of story

Check out an article whose lead author is Dennis Quaid, yep, you read it correctly, the actor teamed with some health care professionals to write "Story Power: The Secret Weapon" which was published in the March issue of the Journal of Patient Safety. As you might recall Quaid's twins were overdosed with heparin but survived this medical error. Click here to read this important article (free full text).

Pfizer posts payments online

From the New York Times article:

Pfizer, the world’s largest drug maker, said Wednesday that it paid about $20 million to 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals for consulting and speaking on its behalf in the last six months of 2009, its first public accounting of payments to the people who decide which drugs to recommend.

Pfizer also paid $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centers and other research groups for clinical trials in the same period.

While other pharmaceutical companies have disclosed payments to doctors, Pfizer is the first to disclose payments for the clinical trials.

Click here to access the NYT article. Click here to access Pfizer's disclosure website.