Other Forms of Overcharging in Hospitals

In response to my previous post talking about hospital overcharging being overstated, I got an interesting reply from someone about other ways that “overcharging” is happening in hospitals.

Some are overcharging according EMR upgrade coding errors. How about $720 for ONE nitro tablet. Insurance company did not catch it either. About 9 months after an EPIC implementation so how many people/Insurance were overcharged and never knew?

In the meantime a gastric band operation in the UK is $7500 average. In the US it is between $15k and $30k depending on State. Is that not overcharging?

The first one is really interesting. You can see how after implementation of an EHR in a hospital it would be easy to charge extra for something (even accidentally). There are so many details to look at during an EHR implementation that it’s easy to see how something could be overcharged. Plus, it’s probably not a surprise to many that the insurance company doesn’t catch many overcharges.

The second point they made isn’t an over charge as we were describing it. Although, the price disparity question is a really important one and could be considered over charging in healthcare. Just a different form.

I’ve long said that I think the biggest key to fixing the healthcare pricing problem is to infuse more transparency into the system. Once transparency gets applied to pricing, it usually gets resolved pretty quickly. The second piece to transparency is shifting the cost responsibility to patients. In the past, patients didn’t care since they just paid their co-pay. However, this is quickly changing with more high deductible plans. This shift will require price transparency and then healthcare will be held accountable for what they’re charging for their services.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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