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Doctors allege non-physicians activate codes
In the North Carolina whistleblower complaint, the doctors said unnecessary trauma codes were typically activated by a non-physician, often a physician’s assistant, who was given little time to make an actual assessment.
After April 15, 2020, when TeamHealth started delivering contracted services to Mission Hospital’s Emergency Department, the number of trauma activations surged, according to the lawsuit.
On one busy ER shift in May 2022, Ramming witnessed many medically ill patients getting trauma designations, yet many ending up going home, according to the complaint. When he commented on this to the physician’s assistant who was on duty, the response was “trauma overcalls aren’t a problem for corporate medicine,” according to the complaint.
Ramming described a case of an 85-year-old woman who came to Mission’s Highlands hospital emergency room with cat scratches and was given a sepsis alert. He canceled the tests, which were “not needed for cat scratches, needless to say,” he said.
Mid-level practitioners in the emergency department were incentivized to order numerous unneeded or redundant lab tests, including blood samples, urinalysis, laboratory analyses, metabolic panels, CT scans and X-rays, according to the lawsuit.
He also noted that it was common to over-code patients as sepsis cases because it not only pads the bill for extra testing, but also pools non-septic patients with truly sick ones, lowering the overall mortality rate.
Doctors’ lawsuit: HCA Healthcare and TeamHealth overcharged patients
In the North Carolina whistleblower complaint, the doctors said unnecessary trauma codes were typically activated by a non-physician, often a physician’s assistant, who was given little time to make an actual assessment.
After April 15, 2020, when TeamHealth started delivering contracted services to Mission Hospital’s Emergency Department, the number of trauma activations surged, according to the lawsuit.
On one busy ER shift in May 2022, Ramming witnessed many medically ill patients getting trauma designations, yet many ending up going home, according to the complaint. When he commented on this to the physician’s assistant who was on duty, the response was “trauma overcalls aren’t a problem for corporate medicine,” according to the complaint.
Ramming described a case of an 85-year-old woman who came to Mission’s Highlands hospital emergency room with cat scratches and was given a sepsis alert. He canceled the tests, which were “not needed for cat scratches, needless to say,” he said.
Mid-level practitioners in the emergency department were incentivized to order numerous unneeded or redundant lab tests, including blood samples, urinalysis, laboratory analyses, metabolic panels, CT scans and X-rays, according to the lawsuit.
He also noted that it was common to over-code patients as sepsis cases because it not only pads the bill for extra testing, but also pools non-septic patients with truly sick ones, lowering the overall mortality rate.
Doctors’ lawsuit: HCA Healthcare and TeamHealth overcharged patients