Helping our hospitals survive: It Starts with Documentation

Many of you have asked “how can I help our rural communities maintain the access to local emergency care.” As Providers serving critical access hospitals, one of the easiest ways we can help is to properly document the care we are providing patients. Appropriately documenting helps to ensure that our time and efforts are appropriately reimbursed. As clinicians, we strive to provide appropriate evidence-based care to our patients, however we often fall short on our documentation of that care. One of the areas that most often falls short, is critical care documentation.

I would like to share with you a document that one of our Washington critical access facilities disseminated to our provider team. It’s an extremely helpful guide and lists many of the common conditions that may qualify for critical care time as well discusses key items that we must document. Please reflect on each of your cases to see if critical care time could have been added.

CMS Defination of Critical Care-2025august

Paula Silha, MD

Chief Medical Officer, ERx Clinical Partners