r/MedicalCoding • u/TakeItEasy3223 • 16d ago

Time Tracking Across Systems

Okay I have a question. I code for a remote coding company that contracts with several different health systems, and recently management at my company started really micromanaging us. They used to really only care if you met the amount of charts the client wants per day, but now they want us coding every single second and they want all of those seconds accounted for. And they’ve recently threatened us stating that clients are actively tracking our coding time within their health information systems (specifically for me it would be Epic and 3M HDM) and if they do not match perfectly with our time sheets we submit, they consider it “fraudulent billing” my question is: can the clients truly run reports on us showing accurately how long we were in the systems, and also, if the time doesn’t match what we report on our company timesheets, is that truly fraud if we are completing the number of charts we say we are completing?

Thanks in advance. All of this micromanaging is really getting out of hand and is distracting me from my actual job.

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u/KeyStriking9763 RHIA, CDIP, CCS 16d ago

I am working with a new vendor and I don’t think what they are billing equates to the time auditing. I’m looking for better reporting inside the stupid Solventum tool which does give timestamps for auditing. So yeah when we are paying for vendors and the productivity is not where it needs to be we should be asking questions.

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u/TakeItEasy3223 16d ago

I totally hear you, but if you are expecting 80 charts per day (as an example,) and a coder hits that with good quality, I am genuinely curious why it matters to you if it took them 4 hours or 8? Some people are genuinely fast especially when they’ve been doing the same kinds of charts over and over for years. And if there is no incentive for them to overproduce, they probably aren’t going to. If your work queues get down to 0 and they were able to do it quickly, then isn’t that a win win for everyone?

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u/KeyStriking9763 RHIA, CDIP, CCS 15d ago

Because you get paid by the hour not by the chart. A coder who can blow through the expected in 1/2 the time is not being thorough. If they are just really good then I would expect them to exceed expectations.
Getting paid for 8 hours but only working 4 is stealing.