[traumanurses] Re: activation fees

["Leiding, Lisa" <Lisa.Leiding@stvin.org>]

Jill,

In our state activation fees can only be charged by designated hospitals. HOWEVER - one of the things I learned in the past year as we re-did our finances here...no one ever negotiated our activation fees with the third party payers...so the third party payers never paid us it was written off the top of the bill - so it actually looked like we were discounting more if you were a trauma patient. Go that one fixed ASAP.

Bishops and Associates helped us reconfigure our activation fee thought process this year. We too looked at only charging the activation fees on those that had full team activation - however almost all of our patients had the same team response - it was just about time. Did the surgeon come in 30 minutes or were they in house and came to the ED in 10 minutes or did they make a deal with our ED MD's to come after CT etc.... We are a single community hospital with about 5 - 7 level I activations a month that are "COME NOW" response.

When we looked at the services that we have to have on a 24 hour a day basis - it made no financial sense to do activation fees on only 5 to 7 patients a month. Those 5 to 7 patients can not "pay" for a trauma program. So with the help we looked at basing activations on the ISS scoring of everyone that meets our pre-hospital level I and level II and consultation criteria.

The only people thrown out of this mix then were those that we don't have a documented pre-hospital report on. Which a month ago was almost all of my 50 patients who decided to bring their paralyzed, their shot, their stabbed, and their "my truck ran me over" by POV.

Bishops and Associates will come to your hospital and do the presentation for the administration and physicians. Our state received a grant to bring them to the designated centers in New Mexico to help figure out how we can comply with the new financial portion of our regulations. I am sure that there are others out there who will do the same thing - I am just not familiar with them.

Lisa McLaughlin
Santa Fe, NM

-----Original Message-----
From: Jill_Buttry@deaconess.com [mailto:Jill_Buttry@deaconess.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 2:33 PM
To: TraumaNurses@TraumaNurseSoc.org
Cc: connie@traumacare.com
Subject: [traumanurses] activation fees

I would like to have clarification on a couple of issues below please:
*       Hospitals cannot charge Trauma Activation fees until they are
verified/designated as a Trauma Center - correct?
*       Do you charge activation fees even if it was considered an over or
undertriage?

Thank you for your input.

Jill Buttry, RN, MSN, CNS
Deaconess Trauma Program Manager
jill_buttry@deaconess.com
www.deaconess.com/trauma
Office: (812)450-3867
Fax: (812) 450-5049

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