Common sense says that if a payor wants your records, they're looking for an excuse not to pay for the work you've done.
This should not be surprising: the payor's raison d'etre is to take in as much money as possible, while paying out as little as possible.
What should be surprising is that our fellow physicians should be falling all over themselves to help the weasels do it to us.
The whole conversation on that forum was about people striving for a method to reduce our patient care into discrete data points that non-medical personnel can analyze. Why do they want to analyze our data?
1. Because they hope that our compliance with their policies will make people live longer and have less illness. All sane individuals will understand that these organizations do not promote these policies because they care, mind you, but because they make more money when there are fewer claims.
(As the big roulette wheel of life goes around, they are putting their chips on whatever the latest research says will make people live longer and have less illness. They may be right sometimes, but the trend will be for flashy studies that get a lot of publicity to be turned into draconian policies, more and more quickly, because the policies will become easier and easier to implement through technology).
2. Because as they raise the bar higher and higher, there will be a certain lag time between institution of the new measure, and the ability of physicians to jump through the hoop. That lag time means money that they won't have to pay out.
3. Because information is power, and the payors want to control us, because we are the ones who order all the stupid expensive tests and treatments! In the past, trying to control physicians was likened to herding cats, but technology is giving them the means to instantly monitor us, instantly correct us, and instantly deny us our daily bread.
Viewed in this context, all the self-congratulation in that forum is a little disgusting to me.
