Synopsis:
Education will set you free, in all things, including Medicare fraud and abuse investigations. Recently, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) began investigating possible Medicare billing fraud and abuse from a new perspective. Some physicians made contact with the government to complain about the pressure they felt to document in a certain way in their medical records at hospitals where they admitted patients. Requests were made, said these physicians, by physician leaders in the hospital asking attending physicians to document a blood loss anemia, ehydration, CHF, or other conditions in their patients’ records. In many cases, the attending physicians did not agree with the requests. But, they said, they felt pressured to provide the documentation. The inherent problem with this scenario is that the attending physicians, the ultimate overseer of their patients, often feel disempowered when it comes to clinical documentation issues.
