Friday, August 25, 2000.
At the last MAB Meeting, Dr. Bachan's
letter of complaint concerning the errors in the billing of his anaesthetic
fees in two cases through no fault of his own was discussed.
It was suggested that we, the
anaesthetists, should each submit a similar letter detailing any cases we have
had in the past that resulted in or potentially could have resulted in either
the non-inclusion of our fees or the classification of our fees as late
activity charges.
I would strongly urge all of you to
write in to strengthen our case that the hospital must implement a better
system to reduce the loss of revenue among the anaesthetists due to weaknesses
in the billing system. Without "ammo" it is difficult for me to
fight our case. At the moment the "special anaesthetic voucher
system" that we had proposed has been stalled. I need to convince them
that the problem is there and needs to be corrected.
A good starting point would be the list
of "bad debts written off" in the two recent exercises. Get the
details of the two lists of patients. In particular, try to find out if they
are late activity charges and whether they were late due to some clerical
error or because surgeons submitted their vouchers late. If you have other
cases that you managed to rectify before the patient was discharged, include
them as well.
The next MAB meeting will be on 13
September 2000, so if you could hand in your letters by the Saturday before,
that is, 9 September 2000, it will give me the weekend to collate the data.
Kok Wah.