The
Michigan
Association of Healthcare Auditors is
a not-for-profit State organization which has been active since 1991.
Our members are licensed Registered Nurses, Practical Nurses,
credentialed coders, Quality Assurance, case managers, legal nurse
consultants, etc. from Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. Our diverse
membership reflects all aspects of health care reimbursement: hospitals
from throughout Michigan, health insurance, worker's compensation, auto
insurance and disability management. MAHA is a State liaison to
the
American Association of Medical Audit Specialists
(AAMAS), which is the nationally recognized leader in all matters
related to the practice of medical audit and its impact on the health
care delivery system.
For information on AAMAS and CMAS
certification, please visit
www.AAMAS.org
President's
Message
March 19, 2008
Greetings MAHA members!
Our spring conference on 3/7/08 was a big
success according to our evaluations!
Dr. Malinoff , Dr. Halpern and Heidi Sproull,
LMSW gave a very interesting presentation on pain and addiction
medicine. Their perspective was enlightening and made us all stop and
think of the events that lead up to chronic pain medication addiction
and appropriate treatment. We could have listened to them all morning.
We also learned about alternative medicine from Margaret Kammerer of IT
Works and their acupuncturist.
We were updated about new technology now
available in Michigan by Dr. Sahijdak’s presentation on the CyberKnife
Radiosurgery. This technology is truly exciting and provides options for
patients with tumors previously considered inoperable. His animated
presentation was amazing as it showed how the robot synchronizes with a
person’s breathing to provide radiation to the exact location needed.
Dr. Sahijdak also spent a lot of time researching billing codes for us
on this new procedure which he graciously provided to us. We had many
positive comments about bringing this new technology to the conference.
Dr. Carol van der Hurst brought up the end of
the seminar with her presentation of back pain and current algorithms of
treatment. While our brains had been absorbing information all day, her
presentation added a fresh perspective of patient advocacy to those of
us in the insurance industry. She brought a lot of common sense to her
presentation that had a lot of heads nodding in agreement with her. I
particularly enjoyed her description of the pain scale that she uses
with patients to get an accurate description of their pain instead of
always hearing “10 / 10”!!. She had a unique and objective method to get
a more accurate description of a patient’s pain that I thought was very
clever.
Thank you all for your comments and feedback.
As always, if you know of a speaker that our membership would be
interested in, let us know!
Our fall conference is currently scheduled for
Friday, October 10th so set aside the date! Updates will be
added to our website as they become available. As always, if anyone is
aware of a speaker that our membership would enjoy, please let me know!
Donna Bauby
Don1205@asugroup.com
don1205@asugroup.com
email
web
manager
