Verbal queries...out of the box
Trying to think through a verbal query issue...ours is not an academic institution so we don't have the availability of "rounds" to do verbal queries and our CDI staff is mostly offsite from our hospital campuses. As the Physician Advisor, I'll get charts via an escalation policy after they lay fallow for a week or so to follow-up on a non-answered query with the attending physician. When I call them, my thought (and my sales pitch) is I'm going to try to make their life easier, taking the query off their list by getting the answer from a compliant verbal query. However, on one hand I'm told that the attending physician has to document their response to the query within the medical record themselves, so the point of my phone call is to make them do more work by going back into the record to clear the query, which will not make me any friends in the medical staff. On the other, I'm wondering if as long as I can get the query into the medical record via scanning or some other means (and I understand lots of places don't put them in the record), can we not use that information when acquired in a well-documented and compliant manner and not add to the physician's workload, but provide them a service by taking the information for them? Can't really find any good discussions of verbal queries in the retrospective review or as they relate to the physician conversations. Would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks!
Comments
Just listened to relevant part of podcast. A few of your folks are just a teeny (?) bit patronizing of us stupid docs for wanting to make another doc's life easier, but...there were some useful nuggets to the discussion, and I think we wound up falling on the side that as the Physician Advisor is not the treating doc, he or she can't add to the record on the attending's behalf, and the attending actually has to write something themselves. Unfortunately, the idea of going to the individual physician with the query form, while great in theory, is hard to do in a multi-hospital system with no regular rounding times and hospitalists on a rotating basis, but I agree it's the ideal way to do things. I might give that a go when the queries pile up and I've got a few days to drive around and some books on tape...thanks again!