In my recent story that revealed Grady Memorial Hospital was billing rape victims for free forensic exams, I mentioned that the hospital's financial bureaucracy was broken in other ways. Grady could have received at least tens of thousands of dollars from a special state fund to pay for these exams. But for more than two years, it let this money pass it by.
Why? Blame a fax machine.
Here are some details that didn’t appear in Sunday’s story.
Before the state fund sends out reimbursements, it must receive a complete application for payment from the medical facility that provided the exam. All the fees and services must be included. Grady’s applications lacked entries for “professional fees,” which are the fees charged by a doctor or nurse for his or her services.
At Grady’s emergency room, those professional services are provided by the Emory Medical Care Foundation. Grady was supposed to fax EMCF its patient applications. But Emory hadn’t received any for some time, according to emails between Emory, Grady and the state victims compensation fund.
“It has been extremely difficult to get consistent flow of documents from Grady to our Central Billing Office team,” an Emory official wrote.
For its part, Grady insisted that it was faxing the information to Emory every Monday. At one point, one of its officials emailed Emory to ask if they were faxing the documents to the right number.
Grady says the problem has been solved. It began to provide and verify this information after the AJC began asking questions. In May and June, the state reimbursed it some $57,000 for 88 exams. About a quarter of them date back to 2011 and 2012.
Curious about other problems with Grady's rape crisis services? Read Locked Away, which reveals how the hospital failed to tell police about rapes and hand over evidence of the crime.
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