Live with Dr. Kazi – HCC Coding is Good For Patients
Watch the full interview here!
I’m Farshid Kazi, co-founder of DoctusTech and an internist by training with a focus on palliative care.
Levi: On today’s episode of DoctusTech thought leadership, I want you to go in the weeds a little bit on the topic of HCC coding as it relates to value-based care – and how that is beneficial to patients. And I feel like this is one where I could just wind you up and send you running.
Dr. Kazi: Yeah. HCC coding such a dry topic, but I’m super passionate about it.
Only because it drives why I became a physician, right? And when we think about value based care, it’s such a big umbrella term. But in a very specific way, it’s really getting paid for providing better outcomes.
And when we were all training as physicians back in the eighties, nineties, and even early two thousands, it was about how many patients can you see a day, make sure you get them healthy and move them forward.
But now, value-based care is really paying us as docs to say, “Hey, here’s a subset of patients, take care of them. And if you can keep them healthy and out of the hospital, well, great. That’s profit in your back, your pocket. And if you can’t, then, you know, that’s risky.”
And so where HCC coding goes is, “Let me help appropriately document how sick my patient population is, so I get paid the proper amount!” And that’s not something any of us have been taught in med school. You’re taught how to diagnose a medical problem. You’re taught how to treat it, but when it comes to how to document—and be compliant—and actually show the severity of illness of your patient population, none of us have been taught to do that.
So it’s critical in this new shift.
Levi: Okay. So tell me as… let’s say, “I’m Levi. I have COPD. Why does this matter to me, doc?”
Dr. Kazi: Yeah, so if you are in a value-based care arrangement, your doctor—i.e. me—I care about what your outcomes are. I don’t want to see you only when you’re sick. I want to see you when you’re healthy and make sure you stay on that trajectory so that we keep you healthy.
And we prevent bad things from happening in a couple of years, when maybe you haven’t been taking your medication because it made you feel tired and you didn’t tell me that. And so therefore in three years, I find out you haven’t been taking your medication for three years!
So let’s focus on building that relationship and keeping you healthy before any a catastrophic event happens.
Levi: We use the phrase a lot, “aligning incentives,” and the fee-for-service model aligns incentives, financially around treating you when you’re sick and, and there’s actually a financial upside to sick people. How does this flip the paradigm for the patient?
Dr. Kazi: You can’t get around it, money being the primary driver on how a lot of businesses run, and there’s no hiding that medicine is still a business. And as long as that’s the case, physicians are paid and reimbursed only when I can bill for it.
I can’t bill to have Levi come in and talk to me because he’s having a tough time affording his medications or having a side effects from it. And I wouldn’t know that without bringing you in to have that conversation. I would see you only when something happened to you, you couldn’t breathe. You feel bad. I need to send you to the hospital!
But now in value-based care, I can bring Levi in whenever I want, because I know he’s just going to need a little bit more love and attention as we start to understand what the barriers to your care delivery are.
And so this new model allows me that flexibility to bring in the patients who I want, even if they’re healthy, because I think it’s going to have a change in our trajectory.
Levi: This is a little off topic, but remote patient monitoring and tele-health seem like they’re ways to make that even easier.
Dr. Kazi: That’s right. And there are a lot of companies that are emerging out here that are helping doctors do a number of different things in value-based care, tele-health, remote patient monitoring are all new emerging fields, because the penetration of value-based care reimbursements have gotten to about 30%.
We expect that to go even higher in the next couple of decades where the majority of people of Medicare age will be in some kind of value-based care arrangement.
Levi: Okay. So just to make sure I’m capturing this as a patient, you are financially incentivized to keep me healthier, because if I’m sick, it actually costs more money to take care of me.
If you maintain my health, it costs less money and your practice is more profitable. So you want me healthy probably as much or more than I do.
Dr. Kazi: Absolutely. And the hope is that it’s equal, right? So it’s a joint partnership there, and it allows me the flexibility to do so.
Levi: Now HCC coding: we talk a lot about recapture rate.
So if, if I have COPD, you have to diagnose that again next year in order to maintain that diagnosis. So you need some sort of a mechanism to do that. how does that serve me as the patient?
Dr. Kazi: So, if you forget the coding aspect to it, if you’re just thinking about it from a common sense perspective, you have COPD, you should probably be talking to your doctor about it at least once a year—if not more—saying, “How are things going?”
Any medical issues that you have that are chronic, that the government feels like they drive costs – we should be having a conversation. In fact, that’s a clinical decision that we should be making independent of the government. So as long as you and I are talking about it, it should be documented appropriately.
And that allows the government to say, “Yeah, Levi is at risk for clinical deterioration, but Dr. Kazi is doing the right things to care for him. And therefore here’s a pot of money that we want you to use to reinvest into, into Levi’s care!”
And that might be well visits. I might have a nurse call you just to check in with you. I might have just a, a best friend, who we call a care coordinator, check in with you and solve for loneliness. Make sure we look at your dietary constraints so that you’re not exacerbating some of your other diseases.
These are all ways that the government’s allowing me as a clinician and you as my partner, as a patient to think about where should we spend that money to keep you healthy and out of the hospital.
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