Collegial Conversations

Responding to Jim Amos' post on what keeps us all going led me to recall some of my most valued conversations with colleagues and what happened to those conversations.  I began working at a major hospital in the Twin Cities sometime in the late 1980s.  These conversations happened sometime in the 1990's.  At our hospital there was a large cafeteria are in the corner of the building so that it it was bordered by windows to the exterior on the north and east sides.  One the far east side was a separate room about 1/8 as large as the entire space that was reserved for medical staff.  It was separated by a door from the main cafeteria, but the door was usually open unless there was more noise than usual in the main room.

At one point the GI specialists were all seated at one table.  I knew all of them from consultations they had done on my patients and one of them from medical school.  We had both been in the very first class (Biochemistry) together.  After a while we all routinely met there.  We were joined from time to time by several Renal Medicine, Endocrinology, and Infectious Disease specialists.  The occasional Cardiologist or Surgeon would drop by.  We talked about movies.  I recall one of the films we were discussing was Sylvester Stallone's Cliffhanger and that would have put that conversation sometime in 1993.  One of the discussants was an expert in hostas and he often talked about that botanical speciality.  We spent time talking about pancreatic cancer, imaging studies, narcissistic personality disorder, dementia, psychosis, and futile care and what could be done about it.  The conversations were lively.  Plenty of self deprecating specialty specific humor.  Most of the people there had a good sense of humor.  We discussed topics that were both serious and not serious in a calm and even manner.

I looked forward to those lunch meetings.  It was a chance to talk with colleagues in an open and relaxed manner.  Nobody was bleeding to death or unconscious.  There was no pressure to do a last minute consultation before everybody left the hospital.  More importantly there was none of the nonsense you might encounter let's say on the Internet.  There was no one upmanship.  No moral hypertrophy.  No discussion focused on the superiority of one speciality over another.  Reading the internet gossip, it might be hard to believe that doctors buy their own meals and don't spend every waking moment plotting about how they can use the newest heavily promoted drug.  In fact many of the conversations were focused on just the opposite.  I can recall reading a critique of heavily promoted acetylcholine esterase inhibitors for Alzheimer's disease (AD) with some primary care internists.  The asked me what I thought of these drugs especially the most recent billion dollar drug.  I have been involved in AD drug trials, the initial clinical application of tacrine and the subsequent approved drugs.  I thought that their effects were undetectable.  The internists agreed and one of them said: "Leave it up to the pharmaceutical companies to invent a rating scale that works for their drug but has no clinical meaning."  None of us wanted credit or acclaim for that commentary.  None of us claimed we were keeping Big Pharma honest.  We we just clinicians comparing notes and agreeing that a certain class of medications was not as effective as it was advertised to be.  In this group we had many of these conversations.

Things suddenly changed when the administrators decided to erect a new building along the east side of the existing hospital.  Suddenly the view and windows were completely gone.  Sitting in the doctors section was like sitting in a cave.  At about the same time, we were all told to report to coding seminars and warned that we could be charged with a violation of the RICO statutes if it was found that we were submitting "fraudulent" billing.  Fraudulent billing was basically either billing that somebody said was fraudulent (there was and is no objective criteria) or countersigning a resident's note and not doing enough documentation to actually prove that you had seen the patient.  Proof for the purpose of that seminar was basically doing identical documentation as the resident.  When I heard that I could end up in a federal penitentiary I took the new billing and coding guidelines seriously.  Over the next few years the documentation burden went through the roof.  That resulted in me no longer working with residents.  They were angry about the degree of documentation they saw me doing and thought it reflected on their work.  No matter how many times I said: "No this is me trying to stay out of federal prison" it did not assuage their anger.  I suppose it sounded incredible - even absurd.  But my billing, documentation and coding was actually reviewed based on those standards for years.  That was such an obstacle at one point I decided that it was easier to work by myself.  There was no time for teaching anyway due to the documentation requirements.

My colleagues were under similar constraints.  People just stopped showing up for lunch.  I would run into one or two in the hallway from time to time.  The administrators were also actively involved in moving my colleagues around.  Many did not like it and some of them left.  I had the feeling that if we were left to our own devices and kept things running the way they had been running for years, that we would still be meeting at noon and having the same discussions we had in 1993.  But there was no such luck.  The last time I saw one of my colleagues was about 5 years ago.  We met in the hallway of the same hospital.  We were both thinking about that Stallone movie.

A curious thing happened about 10 years later.  Some administrator had the brilliant idea that a "doctors' dining area" made sense.  They separated it completely from the cafeteria.  They made it more high end to attract the doctors back in the place.  I even met up with some of my previous colleagues there from GI and Renal Medicine.  The conversations still had the potential to be inspiring.  But something was gone forever.  There was no time for collegial conversation anymore.  Most of us were fairly isolated as a result of how the practice had changed.  It was forever transformed by corporate America.  Doctors no longer seemed like inspired people on a life long mission of patient care and education.  And we all knew this could disappear as easily as it materialized.

I had travelled up to northern Minnesota at one point and went down into an old iron ore mine.  There 2,300 feet below the surface was a lunch room.  It was inside a steel cage to protect the miners from cave ins.  I could imagine people working all day a mile below the surface, covered in iron ore dust, and eating lunch in that room.  For a minute I pictured myself as one of those miners.  Brutal unending work in the worst of all conditions.  At one point the tour guide shut off all the lights to demonstrate what it was like lit by carbide lamps on helmets.   We were in a large room about 100 x 100 feet with a 20 foot ceiling. The floor was visible in a dim arc about 5 feet in the distance and everywhere else it was pitch dark.  Miners actually worked like that before electricity and only a few of them had carbide lamps.  It was depressing.  Then we learned that before carbide lamps, the miners used candles.  Even more depressing.  I felt that medicine had taken a step in the direction of the old iron ore mine.

I enjoyed seeing my colleagues every day.  I enjoyed and learned from what they had to say.  If I needed to go to a hospital or clinic in the future I would want to go to one where there were collegial conversations every day.

But I suspect those places are few and far between.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Supplementary 1:  The billing and coding seminar described here actually happened that way.  At the time the FBI was raiding practices and they made some of these decisions.  In internal reviews I went from the best documentation one year to the worst the next even when I had not changed a thing.  Eventually the FBI decided there were probably better thing to do than enforce a purely subjective standard against doctors who were hardly engaged in criminal or terrorist activities.  The out for most organizations was to have an internal compliance department to do the same reviews,  After about 10 years, documentation with residents returned to nearly what it used to be and I could resume teaching again.

90862 Redux?

My original post on the problems with the 90862 CPT code has turned out to be one of the most popular posts on this blog.  I decided to revisit that post in the context of the impending code changes the first of the year.  The headline in this weeks Clinical Psychiatry News says it all: "New E&M Coding Set to Go Into Effect Jan. 1".  The article encourages psychiatrists to learn the new system in the hope that they will be able to get more fair reimbursement in the future.  The explicit downside is that more documentation will be required.  In my own practice more complex E&M codes can require anywhere from two to four times as much time and effort to document with additional time to managed the case apart from additional telephone calls, lab review, and consultation.  The implicit downside is that despite the promise of more reasonable reimbursement that will actually take political action as stated: "Values might rise in 2014, after the professional societies have a chance to survey psychiatrists on the new codes and the RUC (Relative Value Update Committee) looks at revaluing those codes..."

For anyone reading this who does not have a knowledge of this coding system this template from the American Academy of Family Practice provides a good summary.  To give a general idea of the subjectivity of this entire system, I have been documenting and billing 15 and 30 minute 90862s at my current employer for over two years.  Our coding expert told me that all of these notes would meet criteria for 99214.  Actual time with the patient is roughly 20-30 minutes with 10-20 minutes added onto that for associated tasks (lab ordering, call to other doctor, associated paperwork, etc).  I have been billing like this for most of my career, except in a previous specialty clinic where I used E & M codes.

The interesting aspect of this coding system that I always come back to (and can't emphasize enough) is the near total subjectivity of it.  I have described my 90862 procedure and that usually results in a note of about 300 to 500 words.  When I review the notes of other psychiatrists, I often see the note condensed to 4 brief sentences.  The entire note can be less than 75 words.  It is often difficult to tell if an actual conversation occurred between a doctor and a patient.  I describe this to point out the huge variation in the documentation of clinical practice and there is good reason for it.   Compulsive documentation takes an incredible amount of time.  It is usually not possible for me to complete the documentation that I think is necessary during the regular work day and I know I am not alone.  I have called primary care physicians at 7 or 8 PM to find many of them still there trying to catch up on all of the paperwork and documentation from that day.  That is a lot of time investment because of a vague guideline.

The most interesting aspect of coding is how it has been used to intimidate physicians by both the government and the insurance industry.  Apart from satisfying billing requirements most physicians engaged in compulsive documentation are doing it because of the threat of a coding audit.  In that situation the actual notes are reviewed and somebody makes a decision about whether the documentation meets certain coding requirements for a particular bill.  If the decision is no - the physician involved could face massive financial repercussions.  Some insurance companies will look at 10 notes and on that basis calculate a rate of overcoding and multiply that rate by the total patient they cover in that practice and demand repayment.   Although this physician has apparently not been told why the FBI decided to close down her practice, the tactics described on her blog are the similar to those described in cases of alleged billing "fraud".  Keep in mind the only scientific study of this process showed that professional coders could agree that a document reflected a particular billing code at a rate no greater than chance.

Anyone who has read along to this point have probably picked up on the fact that I am not very hopeful that this is a major reform in psychiatric reimbursement.  This whole system was invented to control physician reimbursement and not improve it.  It is a system that looks like it may have some objectivity on the surface but beyond the surface it is pure politics.  The best example I can think of is that any insurance company can decide to reimburse physicians at any rate they want.  They may decide for example that "Dr. Dawson has been billing 90862s for decades, why would we want to suddenly reimburse him for 99214s?  We will just pay him the same regardless of what his coding expert or billing document says."  Just another inefficiency that physicians need to tolerate that detracts from the provision of medical care.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA  

King MS, Lipsky MS, Sharp L. Expert agreement in Current Procedural Terminology evaluation and management coding. Arch Intern Med. 2002 Feb 11;162(3):316-20.

AMA, DOJ, and managed care all on the same side?

That's right and they are all potentially aligned against doctors.

The lesson from the 1990's and again in the early 20th century was that politicians who were not competent to address health care reform in any functional way could come up with all sorts of off-the-wall-theories.  One of the most off-the-wall theories was that widespread health care fraud was a major cause of health care inflation.  It stands to reason if that is the case that is true, the perpetrators would be easy to find and put out of business.  To borrow typical language of the Executive branch it was a War on Healthcare Fraud.

To anyone who did not endure it, it is now a well kept secret.  The tactics of the government used in those days - entering clinics and doctors offices in an intimidating manner and taking out boxes and boxes of charts for review by special agents who were "coding experts" and then assigning some tremendous fine based on alleged "fraud" have been expunged from most places.  I sent two Freedom of Information Act requests to involved federal agencies and was told that information "did not exist" even after I provided the front page from one of the documents with the name of the agency.

It was quite a spectacle and it had doctors everywhere running scared.  After all, the interpretation of notes and linking them to billing documents was entirely subjective.  If a handful of notes was reviewed and bills were actually sent through the mail - racketeering charges via RICO statutes were possible and the fines would skyrocket to the point that nobody could ever pay them.  Federal prison was a possibility.  All for having a deficient note?

What followed was a carefully orchestrated set of maneuvers to render beleaguered physicians even weaker.  A decade of millions and millions of hours wasted on worthless documentation out of paranoia of a government audit.   Whose notes actually "fit" the government criteria?  The notes varied drastically from clinic to clinic and year to year in the same clinic.  And then a masterful stroke.  The government probably realized that their micromanagement of progress notes as leverage against physician productivity was probably undoable.  It would take far more agents than the budget would allow and they would no longer be able to demonstrate "cost effectiveness" in terms of recovered funds on the DOJ web site.

At that point they were able to turn this political device over to managed care companies who could selectively apply it anyway they wanted.  Some physicians noted that their documentation and coding scores by internal audit could be the best in the organization one year and the worst then next even though they had not changed any of their paperwork practices.  These audits to assure compliance with federal guidelines quickly became a mechanism for managed care organization (MCOs) to deny payment and "downcode" a practitioner's billing based on their review of chart notes.  Incredibly the MCO could deny payment for a block of billing submitted or pay much less than what was submitted.  Where else in our society can you decide to pay whatever you want for a service rendered?  That is the kind of power that the government gives MCOs.

Enter the new "partnership" to deal with health care fraud.  It is basically a coalition of the same players who have been using the health care fraud rhetoric for the past 20 years.  The DOJ, FBI, HHS OIG, large insurance companies and managed care corporations.  This quote says it all:

"The joint effort acknowledges the limitations of each health care insurer relying solely on its own data and fraud prevention techniques.  After a 2010 summit, 21 private payers and government agencies discovered that they were victims of the same scams.  As a result, the participants pledged to ban together against fraud."

The HHS Secretary chimed in:

"This partnership puts criminals on notice that we will find them and stop them before they steal health care dollars."

The newly elected psychiatrist-AMA president Jeremy Lazarus advises:

"Claims coding and documentation involve complicated clinical issues and the analysis of these claims requires the clinical lens of physician education and training."

Good luck with that Dr. Lazarus and heaven help any physician who gets caught under the managed care-federal government juggernaut.  And who protects physicians against those who are defrauding them by non payment or trivial payment for services rendered based on a totally subjective interpretation of a chart note?  Nobody I guess.  I guess we will continue to deny that is possible and a common occurrence.

This can only happen in a country where the government provides businesses with every possible bit of leverage against physicians and where most political theories about health care reform are pure fantasy.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Charles Feigl.  New public-private partnership targets health fraud.  AMNews August 20, 2012.

The $40 Call

One of  the local HMOs has been heavily advertising their nurse practitioner diagnostic line. It caught my attention because the radio ad was focused on wood tick season, and it suggested the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease could be rapidly made over the phone and that it could require e-mailing in a picture of the rash or tick.

I used to teach a course in medical diagnostics and diagnostic reasoning and one of the examples I used in that course involved expert diagnosis of rashes from photographs.  An important part of medical diagnostics is pattern recognition. There is probably no better example than the diagnosis of rashes and it should not come as a surprise that experts in rashes or dermatologists do a much better than physicians who are not experts. That is true both in terms of making the actual diagnosis and in the total amount of time that it takes to arrive at that diagnosis.

When I heard about this new service to diagnose Lyme disease based on photographs I went to Medline to see if I could find anything written about it. Managed care organizations and HMOs frequently advertise the fact that they are evidence-based organizations. I really cannot find any studies done on using the Internet or telephone consultation for the diagnosis of rashes or Lyme disease.

I think that this new service has implications for how the business models are impacting the practice of medicine. With all the talk about transparency it would be useful for the public to know the false positive and false negative rates for this diagnostic service. That certainly would be consistent with the literature on the misdiagnosis of Lyme disease.

From a purely economic perspective, it is interesting that the cash charge for this service is on par with the most common cash charge for seeing a psychiatrist in person. As I have previously posted, there is a wide range for the psychiatric charge and it is conceivable that this telephone service generates considerably more cash than a psychiatrist does sitting in a clinic, seeing patients, and doing all of the associated administrative work.

The next logical step for this telephone service is to have patient's complete a number of rating scales and be treated for depression. Whether it is Lyme disease or depression the diagnosticians with the greatest pattern matching and pattern completion capabilities are taken out of the loop.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Let's get rid of worthless documentation

I just became aware of this article by Lucy Hornstein, MD on modifying the current documentation process and found it to be quite exciting because I have had very similar thoughts for some time:

I may be a fellow dinosaur, but I could not agree more.  The vast majority of documentation especially in the EMR is worthless largely because of the proliferation of stereotypical documentation to fit business and government requirements.  The businesses wanted to slow us down at least until they figured out that they could literally reimburse us for whatever they wanted irrespective of the billing code or note.  The politicians want all the bullet points because of the erroneous notion that coders can actually read a note and objectively  decide on the correct code (they can't) and therefore they can fight fraud. 

In the meantime, vast areas of hard drive space are occupied with worthless data because of these notes and the trees die anyway because requesting the information results in an EMR driven telephone book sized tome  with very little information (if any) on each page.

The only thing worse is the EMR driven initiative to rapidly assemble a massive note from existing data using smart text and a few key strokes.  I was on a committee once where we reviewed 10-16 page daily progress notes compiled in various fonts.  The majority of each note was already listed in the record.

I can recall working on a very busy neurosurgical service where we saw 30 patients a day (6-10 in the NICU) and did all the documentation in 2 - 3 hours before going to the OR.  All of the progress notes for the entire hospitalization generally fit on one page.

I have been thinking about Dr. Hornstein's approach for some time and have come to the same conclusion.  The current notes and coding system is basically driven by paranoia and not patient care.  Any EMR system worth its salt should be able to display all of the daily relevant data and provide a check box so there is documentation that the attending reviewed it all and signed off instead of the physician doubling as scribe and displaying it all (after a flurry of mouse clicks) in a massive note.  The actual note needs to reflect the fact that an intelligent life form visited the patient and there is a thoughtful analysis and plan. 


That doesn't happen by filling up templates in an electronic medical record.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Mismanagement of Knowledge Workers

In a previous post,  I discussed Drucker's concept of “knowledge workers” and how that concept applied to psychiatrists and physicians. The basic concept is that knowledge workers know more than their managers about the service they provide, work quality is more characteristic than quantity, and they are generally considered to be an asset of corporations.  I pointed out that physician knowledge workers are currently being managed like production workers and referred to common mistakes made in managing physicians and psychiatrists. Today I will tell attempt to describe how some of that mismanagement occurs using examples that psychiatrists have discussed with me over the past several years.

Inpatient psychiatry has taken a severe hit over the past 20 years in terms of the quality of care. Many people have talked with me about the discharge of symptomatic patients occurring in the context of high volume and low quality. Depending on the organization, a psychiatrist may be expected to run an outpatient clinic in addition to a busy inpatient service or in some cases provide all the medical services to the inpatients with minimal outside consultation. Most hospital care is reimbursed poorly despite political suggestions to the contrary. Psychiatric DRGs are typically 20% less than medical surgical DRGs and they are not adjusted for complex care. Administrators generally "manage" psychiatrists in a way to make sure that inpatient beds are covered. That frequently means that psychiatrists who prefer practicing in an outpatient setting end up doing some inpatient care. An outpatient clinic may be canceled so that a psychiatrist is available to run an inpatient unit. There have been situations where inpatient beds or whole units have been shut down for lack of psychiatric coverage. The only explanation given is that there is a "shortage" of psychiatrists.

I had the pleasure of running into one of my residency mentors in an airport last May. I let him know that I was just finishing up 21 years of inpatient work and moving on to something else. He smiled and said: "Three months wasn't enough?".  I always liked his sense of humor but there is also a lot of reality in his remarks.

I don't mean to imply that it is any easier on the outpatient side. If you are a manager, what could be easier than having a unit of production that you could hold your employees to? It turns out there is something easier and that is being able to set the value of that unit of production. That is what RVU based productivity is all about. A standard managerial strategy these days is to have a meeting with an outpatient psychiatrist and show them how much they are "costing the clinic" based on their RVU production. Spending hours a day answering phone calls, doing prior authorizations, questions from other clinicians, curbside consultations, discussions with family members, and documenting everything doesn't count. I have had the experience calling a clinic at 7 PM and hearing keyboards clicking in the background. I have asked outpatient colleagues how they are able to produce outpatient documentation themselves and still get out of clinic on time. Now that I work in an outpatient setting myself, I know what they were telling me was accurate and that is the documentation gets deferred until later.

The mismanagement does not stop there. At some point in time medical schools decided that there were also going to start basing faculty salaries on clinical production. I suppose every medical school as a formula for converting teaching and research time into production units, but until I see those formulas my speculation is that any activity that does not result in billing leads to lower compensation. The days when physicians were hired as teachers and academicians seem to be gone.  Because of discriminatory reimbursement, departments of psychiatry will be disproportionately affected.

Within psychiatry there used to be an interest in organizational dynamics and how they impacted patient care. The dynamics in most organizations today are set up to promote the business. That has produced a focus on high volume-low quality or in some cases supporting the specialty with the highest reimbursement and procedure rates.   Associated dynamics are in place to select and shape an idealized corporate employee who will modify his or her practice according to the whims of the Corporation. It may be hard to believe but large medical corporations everywhere are trying to figure out how to recruit young physicians who believe in their models. Physicians who don't accept these ideas frequently find that the company is not very friendly to them. There are always various political mechanisms for ousting any dissidents and there is minimal tolerance for debate.  The dissent can be as mild as asking why consultants with less expertise than the physicians in the practice are being called in to critique them and come up with a plan.

When it comes to physician mismanagement there are few businesses that can equal the government. RVUs, the Medicare Physician Payment Schedule, pay for performance, and various failed political theories like fraud as the cause for healthcare inflation, and managed care amplifying all of the above and focusing all of that irrational management directly on physicians.  The result is obvious as enormous inefficiencies, job dissatisfaction, and demoralization. Governments partnering with businesses and placing business practices like utilization review and prior authorization in state statutes increases the burden exponentially. At the heart of this conflict is a physicians training to be a scientific critical thinker and function autonomously with the businesses interest of making a buck. Despite all the lip service to quality, business decisions are always made on a cost rather than quality basis.

It is often difficult to see any light through the blizzard of government and business propaganda that passes for the management of physicians and psychiatrists. Psychiatry has bore the brunt of mismanagement over the past 20 years and that has well been well documented in the Hay group study showing the disproportionate impact of managed care on our field. Inpatient bed capacity has dwindled and the beds that have not been shut down are managed for high-volume low quality work. Outpatient clinics including those run by and nonprofits are managed according to the same model.  Businesses and governments have provided the incentives for this type of practice.  The available consultants in the field only know an RVU based productivity model and nothing else. Rather than treating psychiatrists as knowledge worker assets, the available jobs frequently reduce us to micromanaged clerical workers utilizing about 10% of our knowledge.  It should be no surprise that the environment makes it seem like anyone can do the job.

One of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker was: "More and more people in the workforce and mostly knowledge workers will have to manage themselves".   After all, only  the knowledge worker knows how to best complete the job.  Every psychiatrist that I know, knows how to get the job done and it is often at odds with what we are allowed to do. The best pathway to do this is to optimize the internal states of the knowledge workers and create environment where they manage themselves.  There are very few environments available where that can happen today for psychiatrists.

George Dawson, MD

"The land of 10,000 90862s"

The title of this post is an inside joke for psychiatrists.  90862 is the billing code associated with a psychiatric visit that is commonly referred to as the "med check."  It is an example of what can happen to a profession when government bureaucrats and businesses run amok in determining what they think you do or what you should be doing when you provide patient care.

I first became aware of the political importance of this system in the 1990s, when I had to attend mandatory billing and coding seminars at my place of employment.   In those seminars I learned that the politicians and insurance companies were so desperate to use this arbitrary system that they told us we could go to federal prison for a long time if we submitted a "fraudulent" billing document.  The "fraudulent" document they were talking about was any bill connected to the document of a patient encounter that did not have enough bullet points to qualify for that level of billing.

That is an important concept so let me say it another way.  After every patient encounter, the physician needs to document a note about what happened and indicate a level of billing for that encounter.  When I first started training the note could be as little as one or two lines.  For example, at one point in my training I covered an entire surgical service with a team of doctors.  We could round on 25-30 patients with very complicated problems and write all of the documentation in about 2 hours.  The documentation was "Pain is well controlled, surgical site looks good, vital signs are stable."  We did not have to bother with any billing documents because a hospital billing specialist came by and confirmed that we had seen the patient and submitted the bill.

Somewhere  in the 1990s, a government initiative changed all of that.  The government decided that they needed a way to control the global budget for physician salaries and they decided to develop a system of codes for patient encounters that they assign relative values to and then multiply that by a certain number to set reimbursement for that code.  The entire system rests on the assumption that somebody can look at the description of a patient encounter as written in a note and audit the associated billing document.  It turns out that when this assumption was tested several years later - it was determined to be false, but that did not deter the federal government or the health insurance industry (see reference).

The 90862 is probably the most abused billing code in the psychiatric profession.  The interpretation of what constitutes an encounter that qualifies for this code varies from practice to practice and between organizations.  Patient experience varies from literally talking to a psychiatrist for 5 minutes with the goal of getting a prescription refill to a much richer encounter that includes a discussion of other current problems, additional medical diagnostic discussions and psychological advice.  In some cases, acute medical problems requiring emergency care have been identified in these sessions.  There is no doubt that a considerable amount of gaming occurs on the part of some clinicians and most insurance companies and government payers.

The only gaming possible by the clinician occurs at two levels.  The first is total time spent with the patient.  The folklore is that these are all 15 minute encounters.  Some clinicians insist on seeing patients in half hour blocks and others see 3 - 4 people per hour.  The second is total documentation.  You can literally do a few lines or you can write several paragraphs and stay after work just to do the documentation.  A lot depends on whether you think you will be audited and somebody will be making an arbitrary decision about whether your note qualifies for the charge that you assign to it.

There are myriad ways that a managed care company can game the system.  First of all, they can assign any level of reimbursement to any billing code that they want.  I quoted a New York Times article in another post as saying that a psychiatrist could see three patients for medications and get reimbursed at $50 per session, but the actual reimbursement can be less than half of that.  That same managed care company can also take any bills submitted for patient encounters with higher reimbursement levels and say: "we are only paying you for a 90862 no matter what you do."  If you happen to be working in an institutional setting, a managed care company can negotiate a per diem rate with your employer and not pay the 90862 billing at all.

Stated another way, a psychiatrist can see a patient with complex medical and psychiatric problems and get reimbursed at a level that might lead to them break even - to getting no reimbursement at all depending on the insurance company and contracting arrangements.  Within organizations the relative values for these codes are the basic way that physicians are manipulated to see more patients.  It is referred to as their "productivity" even though producing work for little or no reimbursement is not really productive activity.  The physician managers can demand that they see more and more patients to compensate for the poor or nonexistent rate of reimbursement by managed care companies.

Another artifact of this system is that procedures like surgeries, endoscopies, and angioplasties are reimbursed at a higher rates than a doctor talking with you and discussing the diagnosis and treatment.  That lead to a movement to reimburse the cognitive or nonproceduralist specialties at higher rates.  But given the amount of government payer and insurance company leverage it is impossible to make that happen.

Is there a solution to this problem that in effect makes physicians work impossibly harder to earn a professional salary?  The solution is as easy as considering how I pay my attorney, accountant, mechanic, plumber, electrician, and chimney sweep.  I pay them all by the hour.  In some cases there is an agreed fixed amount, but it is generally many times more than what I would get reimbursed for the lowest 90862 reimbursement.

Getting back to the title of this post, when I looked at the lowest current reimbursement for a 90862 and calculated how many of those bills would need to be submitted to make a professional wage, it came out to about 10,000 patient encounters per year.  Working 50 weeks per year that would mean seeing 40 established patients per day.  The only clinic where I have ever observed those numbers had three nurses rooming the patients and doing all of the documentation before they were briefly seen by a psychiatrist.

As I contemplated all of this I had the thought: "I am living in the 'Land of 10,000 lakes' - maybe we should just change that to the 'Land of 10,000 90862s.' "

George Dawson, MD

King MS, Lipsky MS, Sharp L. Expert agreement in Current Procedural Terminology evaluation and management coding. Arch Intern Med. 2002 Feb 11;162(3):316-20.

90862 Redux? An Update.