General Practice BILLING GUIDE - British Columbia Medical ...

APPENDIX ii OTHER TOOLS TO SUPPORT FAMILY PRACTICE IN BC
These workshops are organized on demand for groups of interested general
practitioners, often at the request of clinics, CME directors, health authority leads, and
PBSG study groups. The physician or agency requesting the workshop is responsible for
enlisting a group of six to seven interested physicians, and for identifying a venue, such
as a hospital meeting room, clinic space, restaurant, or private residence. Interested
participants can contact the College at 604-733-7758 to identify a facilitator and
select a mutually agreeable date. Each group is responsible for any catering costs.
This program is accredited for three Mainpro-1 study credits. An honorarium of $200
will be paid to physician participants.
C. PATIENT REGISTRIES
An essential step in managing or reviewing the management of patients with chronic
disease is to build a register of patients. Practice registers are accurate listings of
patients with certain conditions developed by the doctors from their own records.
Provincial registers are probabilistic and a good starting point from which a physician
can begin to develop his/her own practice register.
Practice Registers
Family doctors are encouraged to develop their own registers of patients with chronic
conditions. These registers are needed to provide planned, proactive care to patients
with chronic conditions. They assist in ensuring that patients receive recommended
care at appropriate intervals and with reminder systems. The registers help doctors
perform audits of their practices as part of quality improvement processes and to take
full advantage of the CDM incentive payments for diabetes, hypertension, and CHF.
The provincial probabilistic registers and a physician’s own billing software (or EMR) are
good starting points for developing a complete patient register.
Provincial Probabilistic Registers
The BC Ministry of Health develops “probabilistic” registers on an annual basis. They
are probabilistic because they are based on administrative records available to the
ministry, such as MSP (Teleplan) claims data, PharmaNet medication profiles, and
hospital discharge data. They do not contain clinical information from medical records,
as this information is not available from administrative databases.
In the aggregate, the registers are estimated to be about 90 percent accurate, but
they cannot be relied upon to reach 100 percent accuracy or to be accurate for any
one individual. This is due to two main factors. First, there are variations in the quality
and completeness of administrative data – for instance, there is the potential for a
great deal of variability in how individual physicians and health care facilities use fee
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GENERAL PRACTICE BILLING GUIDE