This week we were sent to check out a website: http://www.isabelhealthcare.com/home/default
This website was a great thing to discover! I could see it be a great asset to a healthcare provider. this site has information to help make a diagnosis by entering in information about symptoms. There is no way a physician can remember every single diagnosis there is....especially with new diagnoses popping up continuously.
The thing I liked the most about this website is the symptom checker tool. This can be used by anyone. It is free and available, but you have to know it exists. I typed in some symptoms to see what would pop up so I typed in some symptoms my husband had....symptoms that had nothing to do with his GERD, but symptoms that were there when we went to the ED. The physicians came back to GERD both times....so I thought I would play and was floored when one of the possible diagnosis had something to do with the esophagus! This a a wonderful TOOL to use to check on what your doctor has already told you....sort of like a second opinion. This is not something to rely on, because going to the doctor is of utmost importance if you are ill. However, if you are not comfortable with the diagnosis you get, you can use this tool and maybe ask for a second opinion.
Health care fraud and abuse....wow. This happens so much more than I think any of us really know. This can be done by upcoding, unbundling, or outright identity theft. Any of these acts are illegal and can result in legal action if and when caught. Upcoding is done when something else is coded that will bring in a higher dollar amount for the provider. Unbundling is done when something is included in a procedure, but is charged as a separate code and billed separately. And identity theft can be done by using another doctors credentials for billing, or for a patient to say they are someone else to get medical care if they are uninsured.
Any of these acts are costly for the payers as they are paying more than they should. It is like a snowball that is rolling downhill and sooner or later that escalated cost they are paying out will end up hurting the little guy by raising they out of pocket payments or monthly insurance premiums. There is nothing good that will ever come out of being dishonest in any situation.
The last topic for the week we discussed was knowledge. I didn't realize there were so many types of knowledge!
- Internal knowledge is knowledge that comes from within a person brain. It is knowledge we have within ourselves like how to get in our car and drive to the store and back.
- External knowledge is that which comes from outside our brain. As the example of driving to the store and back I gave above, external knowledge would require us to turn on a GPS to get from place to place….to someplace we have never been and do not have the internal knowledge to just drive there and back.
- Coded knowledge is a written step by step procedure to follow to complete a task. This type of knowledge is documented.
- Tacit knowledge is the knowledge an individual person has within themselves to complete a task. This is not written down anyplace; it is individual and needs no guidance to complete tasks at hand. A person with tacit knowledge may not even be able to write down steps to complete a task, they just do it.
- Active knowledge is knowledge that is actively used to do a job, as a nurse would do.
- Passive knowledge is a type that the person with the knowledge does not actually use what they know to complete tasks, but passes their knowledge on to others to use to complete tasks.
- Transmitted knowledge is taught or read, as we are all getting transmitted knowledge through our educational experiences.
- Experiential knowledge is learned through experience, or by doing tasks and learning from those tasks.
- Declarative knowledge is the properties between concepts. It is an expressed knowledge, like stated in a sentence.
- Procedural knowledge is a “how to” type of knowledge. The example given in our lecture was perfect; a recipe is a procedure that has to be followed in a certain order to bake something.
All types of knowledge are needed to make a facility a well-rounded facility. You need the people who "just know" things, the people who can follow step by step directions, the people who can write down those directions, and the people who have learned things through education or other means and can just do their tasks without asking or looking things up.
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