|
In response to
"the fascinating thing about where I work is that we spend so much time talking about billing. not the process, but the philosophy"
by
tRuMAN
|
We also talk about billing, but with a completely different focus.
|
Investigators often want to look at covariates like obesity or smoking in the patient samples we provide them for research. We point out that since this is billing data, obesity and smoking are very poorly captured. The physicians and hospitals don't get paid anything for coding it, so they have little motivation to do so.
To give you an example, we once looked at the percentage of adults in our private insurance database from our state coded for smoking. It came back as 1%. Wow, we're so healthy here! :P
|