Hospitals Puts Off Patient Billing For Several Months During EMR Rollout

Here’s something you don’t see every day. A New Hampshire hospital apparently delayed mailing out roughly 10,000 patient bills going back as far as 11 months ago while it rolled out its new EMR.

According to a report in the Foster’s Daily Democrat,  members of Frisbie Memorial Hospital’s medical staff recently went public with concerns about the hospital’s financial state. Then a flood of delayed patient bills followed, some requesting thousands of dollars, the paper reported.

Hospital officials, for their part, said the delay was planned. Hospital president John Marzinzik said Frisbie needed time to implement its new Meditech EMR and didn’t want to send out incorrect bills during the rollout.

In fact, Marzinzik told Foster’s, under the previous system, records generated during doctor visits weren’t compatible with forms for hospital billing.

Rather than relying further on this patchwork of incompatible systems, Marzinzik and his staff decided to wait until the process was “absolutely clean” for patients. The hospital decided to have a staff member validate every balance shown on a statement before sending them out, he says.

Previously, in December of last year, anonymous Frisbie medical staff members sent Foster’s a letter to share concerns about the hospital and its administrators. The criticisms included skepticism about the over-budget implementation of the $13.5 million Meditech system, which they named as one of the reasons they lack confidence in the hospital administration. The staff members said that this cost overrun, as well as other problems, have undermined the hospital’s financial position.

As is always the case in such situations, hospital leaders took the stage to deny these allegations. Frisbie Senior VP Joe Shields told the paper that the hospital is in sound financial condition, and also said that the only reason why the Meditech project went over budget by $1.5 million was that the administrators delayed the implementation by seven weeks to give the staff holiday time off.

Hmmm. I don’t know about you, but to me, some parts of this story look a little bit bogus. For example:

* I appreciate accurate hospital bills as much as anybody, but the staff was going to check them manually anyway, why did it take 10 or 11 months for them to do so?

* The holidays take place at the same time every year.  Did administrators actually forget they were coming to an event that necessitated an almost 10% cost overrun?

Of course, only a small number of people know the answers to these questions, and I’m certainly not one of them. But the whole picture is a little bit odd.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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