Fall and the Samain Moon
Grateful for this article: Doctors at Allina Health Unionize and even more grateful for the docs who made it happen.
Kate retired in 2011, 12 years ago. She had burned out on medicine long before. Why? Not her patients. But the demands of corporate medicine and its rabid insistence on revenue capture. Upcoding was pushed and pushed hard. Upcoding means doing those things in a visit that qualify for a code that brings in more money than the original or anticipated code for the visit. Patient visits were shortened. Again, more patient visits per day means more revenue capture. Though it wasn’t often an issue in pediatrics the shortening of hospital stays did affect Kate’s sickest patients since they were the ones who ended up in the hospital. Note that neither upcoding nor shorter patient visits nor shorter hospital stays have good patient care as their motivation. In fact the results are often the opposite of good patient care. That is, to be clear, they create bad care.
Kate and I talked about doctor’s unions a lot. Looked up some information. Talked to some others. But the time wasn’t right. The pandemic induced staffing shortages have made this the right time. And I’m so glad, for Kate’s sake, that leaders in this new movement are physicians at her old place of employment: Allina.
Go union!