By Angie Bush, MSRS, RT, FAHRA, is the Administrative Director Imaging Services at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
Let’s just say it, it doesn’t matter what type of system you work for: For profit, non-profit, academic, community hospital or ambulatory imaging, getting staff credit for a non-billable procedure is tough! At the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas we worked with our executive administration and found a way.
The UTMB executives put out their yearly goals and one was to grow the OR services. Since our system is very sensitive to goal alignment this was a great opportunity for us. The Unit of Service (UOS) measurement used to determine productivity and volume in imaging is a billable CPT code. Since OR Imaging is bundled into the OR exam, we never received staffing credit for those procedures. As imaging leaders, you can see how we were set for failure. The system could not grow the OR service line unless they have the support staff to help.
In response, we requested new cost centers specifically to support the OR with a UOS that could grow as the OR grew. Instead of the UOS being a billable CPT code, we took the exact same UOS the OR uses for their staffing and that is case hours.
The first year was tricky. We did a retrospective review of how many FTEs we typically staffed the OR with. Then took that year’s OR case hours to come up with a productivity standard. So, when the next years budget came out if the system was budgeting for more case hours in the OR, we benefited from that same increase and were able to add more imaging labor hours to support this growth.
We are now in our third year of having separate OR imaging cost centers and so far, so good. It has been a huge benefit for our academic and larger community hospitals. We have a smaller hospital with less than 20 beds and for that hospital, separating out the OR imaging was more labor intensive than the others because we had to “float” hours into it whenever the technologist was needed. The other campuses are busy enough to keep staff in the OR all day. •
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