Discussion Question

1. You are a new administrator at Jonestown Medical Center. You receive a telephone call from the nurse manager of the emergency room. Dr. Smith, an emergency room physician who is an employee of your hospital, has just reported for duty. The nurse manager suspects that Dr. Smith is intoxicated. What do you do?

2. You are the practice manager of Docs R Us, Ltd., a large multispecialty medical practice employing more than 100 physicians. You are conducting a random review of billing for doctors in the practice and you discover that one of the internists in your group who treats mostly Medicare recipients has been checking off the wrong code for her procedures on the billing form. The procedures on the patient record do not match the billing form codes. You pull up her files for the past 3 months and find a pattern of upcoding. When you meet with her to review this miscoding, she becomes very defensive and angry. What do you do? How could you have prepared better for the meeting with the physician?

3. You are a new administrator at a hospital, well known for pulmonary medicine. The physicians in the ICU, the ER, and the department of pulmonary medicine have demanded to meet with you about the shortage of respiratory therapists. You stall them for 48 hours so you can gather data. What types of information will you need to collect to have an intelligent conversation with this powerful group of physicians?

4. Dr. White ordered an unusual dose of a medication. May Patterson, RN, sees the order and believes it to be the wrong dose. She calls Dr. White, who insists that she give the medication-as written. Nurse Patterson calls you, the administrator on call for the weekend, to resolve this crisis. What do you do?