We've been charging and billing insurance since Feb.  Before we did
it, our supervisor called other local hospitals (pretending to be a
mom) and found that nearly all did charge and were getting insurance
reimbursement.  In talking professional to professional, she learned
that one secret is to charge to the baby, not to the mom.  Even if
sore nipples is the most obvious presentation, we get the order from
the baby's doc and if nothing else applies, the diagnosis is
"neonatal breastfeeding problems".  We haven't received any
complaints about charges being billed back to the moms and
anticipate our first statistical report within the next month.  I
was reluctant to charge (my LLLL background), but when it was
pointed out that if you come back to the hospital for lab work  or
PT ,for example, you expect there will be a charge and seeing an LC
(in the hospital setting) shouldn't be any different.  The only ones
that have expressed surprise at there being a charge are the ones
who came in for free with previous babies.

For documentation, we have found the TLC program (stands for The
Lactation Consultant) to be about the only one avaialble with as
much usefullness.  We also started pump rentals and it had the best
opitons, including being able to gather statistics and info on
completed rentals-something the other rental computer programs
didn't have.  There are some "glitches" and frustrations about how
it works-things that we would have done differently had we been
creating one from scratch.  However, many of the "lists" can be
edited to meet your needs and be more current and we keep changing
those the more we use the program.  Again, it is certainly not
perfect, but short of creating one on our own, it was the most
useful we could find.  (Note: I have no financial interest in the
program or the company).

Winnie

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