One of the most famous examples of the law of unintended consequences is Kudzu. Introduced to the United States in 1876, the plant was originally intended as erosion control. Currently spreading at a rate of 150,000 acres per year, the plant will overtake everything in its path when left unchecked.

What are the unintended consequences created by your EMR implementation? Think back to charge entry employees. Usually, when keying charges into the PM system, the process is more complicated than simple data entry. Those employees are required to actually fill gaps in the claim that were missed by the physician or are required by every insurance carriers. When the charge entry process is automated by EMR, charge data flows directly from the physician into the PM system without the benefits of a claim review. 

Are you brave enough to have charge data go directly from physicians onto a claim? Most physicians do not want to be medical coders or have to remember thousands of coding rules that apply in different scenarios with different payers. Most billing and A/R staffs would rather not receive denials resulting from charges going directly from physicians onto a claim. The solution most billing managers employ is to designate the same charge entry employees used before EMR templating to review the charges from the EMR and make corrections prior to submitting the claims. This erodes the savings from automating the charge entry process!

Be careful not to let the kudzu overtake your carefully manicured billing process. Overgrown already? Seek a medical coding and claim scrubbing solution today.