Be Prepared, Be Innovative and Be Safe!

In unprecedented crisis of COVID-19, the first instinct is to triage our activities, often weeding out the ones that seem to be the least important. Some of those will never surface again and just become part of the detritus left behind.

However, documentation mustn’t be one of them. From a clinical standpoint, documentation is critical to caring for patients with COVID-19; it’s essential to tell the patient’s story accurately and completely. When this is done in a codable manner, it’s the key to bringing in desperately needed income and decreasing financial toxicity for the patient who’s often eligible for expanded resources. Such efforts also will help avoid medical billing and payment issues in the months and years following this pandemic.

Tucked into the recent CARES Act, the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act (also known as the stimulus package), is a provision that temporarily removes the Medicare sequester from May 1 through Dec. 31, 2020, and extends it an additional year past its original end date. This provides you with a guaranteed 2% increase on all Medicare payments. The caveat: The claim needs to be clean and complete with no inaccuracies, errors or missing information to be processed quickly and paid completely.

I’m urging you to find someone within your department who can shoulder the responsibility of making this happen. Perhaps it’s someone, even working from a remote location, who will be the steady driving force for financial solvency. The stimulus package is providing the funding, but it’s up to each one of you to ask for it and use it wisely to help cover COVID-19-related expenses and lost revenue.

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