Helping Us Help Our Hospitals

We all spend a fair amount of time recognizing and treating severe sepsis.  One thing we can do for our hospitals is to make sure that we allow them to code appropriately for the patients we care for.  Here is a story that illustrates a) how hospital coders should look out for our diagnoses and b) how we can help them.  We must not lose sight of the fact that coders can only code for what we write in the charts.  If we help our hospitals to recover adequate reimbursement for what we're doing, we'll be able to do it for a lot more people.  Notice in this story that when the physician diagnoses "urosepsis"  it is coded (and must be coded) as a simple urinary tract infection, when the actual circumstance is that this is severe sepsis with acute organ failure resulting from a urinary tract source.  This is a common mistake that physicians make, costing hospitals tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a year.  We're all in this boat together, so we should make the ride as easy for one another as we can.  It doesn't take any longer to document the correct complex diagnosis than it does to document the simple one.