Over the past few years, our utilization management (UM) team has been hard at work to shift the habits of admitting physicians when it comes to assigning appropriate admission status.
Nothing like a pandemic to create a utilization management nightmare.
Mustering confidence amid so many unknowns associated with COVID-19 has proved challenging. Guiding providers to make the right status decision for a COVID-19 patient, considering ever-changing insurance waivers, government regulations, skilled nursing facility (SNF) closures, and the progressive and constant evolution of managing the disease itself is no small feat.
When an onslaught of patients was transferred to our hospitals from community SNFs overrun by COVID-19 – including COVID-19-negative patients – it presented a conundrum as to what their status at the hospital should be. In the heat of the moment, I became desperate. I started feverishly composing COVID-19 admission guidelines reflective of our health system’s circumstances, with the help of collegial advice inclusive of the RAC Relief listserv and my steadfast, battle-worn UM director. Of course, as you can guess, as soon as I finalized these guidelines, new information became available, prompting an update before even disseminating the initial version. Hence, I found myself in the middle of COVID-19 chaos.
But yes, I finally got ahead of the flow of information enough to publicize COVID-19 admission guidelines throughout our health system. Though in doing so, I could not help but realize the dreadful reality that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) would never pay for “prolonged observation” for these patients. My internal dialogue would not turn off. So I quickly retreated to our UM department’s mantra: stay calm, conservative, and compliant. I mustered my reserve and prepared another revision to these guidelines – one more reflective of our UM department’s true north.
I’m fortunate to be part of a large, progressive, not-for-profit health system, wherein leadership upholds high-quality and patient-centric care as being paramount; because of this, the guidelines were amended to emphasize the individuality of each patient’s admission. And on this version – given the frequency of updates to this working document – a disclaimer was added: “remember, UM recommendations may change as COVID-19 response and treatment continues to develop.”
Understanding that our health system’s main source of admissions during the COVID-19 surge is anticipated from SNFs, we devised the following list of admission recommendations:
I would like to tell you that these recommendations are infallible, and we have no UM issues, but, our physician advisors and UM team battle daily to prevent the attending physicians’ temptation to admit everyone, whether COVID-19 + or PUI, as inpatients. So far, these COVID-19 admission guidelines work best for our health system, and help us in our efforts to be compliant. I welcome your use of them also. Please feel free to tailor or dismantle the guidelines, but remember that they are fluid, and I reserve the right to change them due to our new normal: COVID-19 chaos.
I receive a lot of newsletters every morning to help me stay abreast of what is happening in the healthcare industry. A troubling recent trend
EDITOR’S NOTE Day 3 of the federal shutdown continues. This article by Mark Spivey is part of a special section today published by RACmonitor and
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