Physician engagement in three "easy" steps

It’s an age-old question: How do you get physicians to support documentation improvement efforts?

“I first spoke on this topic 26 years ago,” says William Haik, MD, FCCP, director of DRG Review, Inc., in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. “The same points I might have made then are still important, but Medicare keeps giving us additional reasons to make sure the documentation is as specific as possible.”

In the 1980s, when Haik first started practicing as a pulmonologist, he was the only one in his county, so hospitals and other physicians sent their sickest patients to him for treatment. One “sunny Sunday,” as he puts it, the local paper decided to rank hospitals against each other using the region’s outcomes for pneumonia patients.