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Old August 2nd, 2017 #1
Sean Gruber
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Default Corner-cutting in Kwa-care

Double-Booked: When Surgeons Operate On Two Patients At Once

Quote:
(T)he issue of overlapping surgery — in which a doctor operates on two patients in different rooms during the same time period — has ignited an impassioned debate in the medical community, attracted scrutiny by the powerful Senate Finance Committee that oversees Medicare and Medicaid, and prompted some hospitals, including the University of Virginia's, to circumscribe the practice.(...)

Hospitals decide whether to allow the practice and are primarily responsible for policing it. Medicare billing rules permit it as long as the attending surgeon is present during the critical portion of each operation — and that portion is defined by the surgeon. And while it occurs in many specialties, double-booking is believed to be most common in orthopedics, cardiac surgery and neurosurgery.(...)

Patients who signed standard consent forms said they were not told their surgeries were double-booked; some said they would never have agreed had they known.(...)

(Critics say surgery) is not piecework and cannot be scheduled like trains: Unexpected complications are not uncommon.(...)

Indiana orthopedic surgeon James Rickert regards double-booking as a form of bait-and-switch. "The only reason it has continued is that patients are asleep," said Rickert.(...)

"Having a fellow so you can run two rooms helps augment your income," he added. "You can bill for six procedures: You do three and the fellow does three." The critical portion of the operation required by Medicare and designated by the surgeon can mean "running in and checking two screws for 10 seconds."(...)

(C)hairman of surgery at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, (Britt) says that efficiency has little to do with concurrency.(...) "Most [surgeons] are doing it for lifestyle."(...)

Eliminating most concurrent procedures, (Richard Shannon, executive vice president for health affairs at U.Va.) said, actually resulted in an increase of 560 surgeries in 2016 over 2015, using the same number of operating rooms. "Concurrency was masking an efficiency problem," said Shannon.(...)

http://khn.org/news/double-booked-wh...ients-at-once/
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Old August 9th, 2017 #2
Jeffrey Smither
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Typical greed in the KWA. Anything to save and make $$.
 
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