Kristy Brown, Centrex Rehab’s President & CEO, wrote a guest column for McKnight’s Long-Term Care Blog in November titled “Efficiency and Overly High Expectations Hurt Residents and Therapists”. The column discusses how overly high expectations, especially in regards to billing efficiency, can cause burnout, pressure to make poor choices, and in general diminish quality of patient care and employee satisfaction. An excerpt is below and the full column can be found here.
The higher expectations are for billing efficiency, the greater the chance will be for inappropriate ethical and moral decision making. If a therapist is required to achieve a certain level of efficiency in billing-and knows that if this doesn’t happen, he or she will be reprimanded by a supervisor-a wrong decision can easily be made. More specifically, therapists may feel pushed to make poor choices and allow billing to occur when care hasn’t happened.
Medicare wants to see distinctive, individualized care delivered to all patients. Every single evaluation and treatment should be specific for each individual. Again, if therapists work for a company with high efficiency expectations, the ability to individualize and differentially diagnose and treat could diminish significantly.
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