Hospitals: Feds share billing blame

On Monday, HHS and DOJ sent a letter to five major hospital groups warning them not to use electronic health records to "game the system" and boost their revenues. The scathing HHS/DOJ letter came just days after a New York Times story analyzing Medicare data suggested hospitals and physicians were using electronic health records to illicitly pad federal reimbursement by exaggerating the scope of services they provided. The Center for Public Integrity this month also published a detailed series on billing and "upcoding" that also examined the role of electronic health records and the related billing software.