Outtakes
After every single story I write, I end up a mess. My hairstyle flops. My desk is piled up with papers. I can't find my right shoe. I accidentally don my interview transcribing headphones in the lunchroom (and let me tell you, the headphones are large).
The June 30 cover story on physician liaisons, practicing physicians who work between the HIM department and the physician team, was certainly no exception. After much struggle, the story is finally filed. As always happens, I am absolutely amazed at the amount of material I didn't get to use in the article. I interviewed six people, and I ended up with 22 pages of transcribed notes from the interviews, all in 12-point Times New Roman font (with 1-inch margins, if you're wondering), and that may not seem like much, but trust me, it is when you're trying to pare it down to fit on a few print pages.
I didn't get to use some of my favorite quotes because there's only so much room in the magazine, so I figured I'd do that here. The physicians I spoke to were fantastic, and I'm not just saying that because they might read this. I told my dad how cool they were--so they really were great to work with.
With their permission (which I haven't gotten as of writing this, but which I will get before it's posted, so if you're reading this, yay, they said it was OK!), I am posting some "outtakes" from my sources. (And I have even more backstory posted here.)
First up is William Haik, MD, of DRG Review, and since this is a blog I won't go into the huge formal title thing here, but you can look at the article for more information. He has a pretty great story about how he got involved with coding (that's in my sidebar), and he even worked on the editorial advisory board of Coding Clinic, and worked alongside the late Faye Brown, RHIA.
His local paper published results that didn't make him look too flattering--and while he admits that some of the problem was due to his own documentation, much of it was because there was no code for certain conditions, like gram-negative bacterial pneumonia, or COPD with asthma, common conditions that Dr. Haik, a pulmonologist, deals with (all of this is explained better in my sidebar--I am more eloquent in print than on the computer screen, I promise). He joked that he "did what most doctors do--I went down to medical records and bawled them out, and they explained to me that a lot of it was my documentation, but at the time there was actually no code for gram-negative bacterial pneumonias, and there were some other issues, too."
Dr. Haik also talked about the risks of training physicians to be physician DRG advisers. "You train them, and you give them all sorts of information, and then all of a sudden you've got experts," Dr. Haik kidded. "That's part of the DNA for doctors. Some people would call that obnoxious ... You kind of create a monster sometimes."
I also loved this quote from Norman Ward, MD, medical director for case management at Fletcher Allen Health Care. He gave this answer when asked what qualities an ideal physician liaison should have. "I think that any physician like myself who does this basically has to have an inquisitive mind for trying to make sense out of what is often a senseless system," Dr. Ward said.
Overall, I found myself very impressed with every single source I spoke to for the article. They were each humorous in their own ways, and each had a unique way of expressing their thoughts. It's sometimes frustrating for me to let things slip out of articles and onto the cutting room floor, but as I said, there's only so much room in print.
I'll try to do more of these outtakes columns (as long as it's cool with my sources), and I'll be sure to name each blog post something horribly cliché, like "Behind the Music," or "Unplugged," or "The Director's Cut Special Edition DVD." Feel free to ask any questions you might have on the article here as well by posting below, and as always, if you've really got a beef or a compliment (guess which I prefer), you can send a letter to editor Lisa Algeo at lalgeo@advanceweb.com. Thanks for reading!