Patient charges

[Whatthe?]

I work at an ASC which is owned by an out of state corp. Up until now, we were using a package pricing or I think they call it "global billing" to charge for our cases. The corp is transitioning us into charging for individual items, which is what the hospitals I used to work for did. But, I think it's kind of strange to charge for individual alcohol pads and pieces of gauze that anesthesia uses from leftover packages of 4x4's (that are clean, obviously). To me that seems like a waste of time and effort for those little things. Also, we use multi-dose vials of Lido and Marcaine, etc. so how do you charge for that?

I'm not an accounting person but shouldn't things like that just be lumped together into some misc. talley like x=5 or something? I'll write down every package, suture, whatever but charging for individual alcohol pads seems ridiculous. Anesthesia is having a field day mocking this. What do you do at your place? I wanted to get some ideas to perhaps bring to the materials manager in case there is something else that can done.

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

Several of our supplies, when added to the list, show up as "no charge" and those of us who have worked there for a while know which ones they are, and don't bother adding them. This includes dressings, most sutures, drapes, things that get used on every patient and pretty much included in the price of the OR time. They tried to get us to charge for every little thing "to keep track of stock" but that didn't last long. Sorry, but on a ruptured AAA, I'm not to worried about getting every little suture or hemoclip in the computer; I'm too busy checking blood, opening more supplies for the field, that sort of thing.

[Whatthe?]

I know, like we have time to sit and pour over the paperwork, right? Obviously, the people that come up with this are the ones who can sit and pour over the paperwork at their desk and don't realize what we really do. We don't do life-threatening emergent cases but on some of our smaller cases that are fast paced with quick turnovers, like cataracts, I barely have time to get the lens stickers in the right places and the charting done. We still do paper charting so I'm writing as fast and sloppily as possible to keep up and I'm not going to count alcohol preps. I'll keep track of a JP drain but not a glove or 4x4. We'll see how far this goes.

[tring520]

We are required to charge for everything we open. Whether it be gloves, hypos, skin staplers...anything that was opened and used for the case we charge for it. It's very tedious!