When you see a doctor, he doesn’t fill in the level of complexity of your visit beforehand, he does it after the fact. (When appointments are scheduled, an estimation of time that will be needed is made to know how close to schedule the next appointment, but if that were a perfect system, we would never find ourselves waiting in the doc’s office!) Why should it be different for lactation visits? Many have commented that what you hear ahead of time doesn’t necessarily pan out in the visit itself. I think we have all had experiences where we thought it should take a few minutes and it took well over an hour as well as situations we thought were going to be very complicated that were “solved” in just a few minutes! Wouldn’t it be sufficient to classify by the time entailed? We did this at the hospital where I worked. For inpatient visits (for our records, not billing) we classified by <15 min., 15-30 min, 31-60 min and over an hour. For OP visits I believe it was <30 min, 30-60 min, 61-90 min and over 90 min. When we had outpatients, we tried to schedule about 1 ½ hours apart, never less than 1 hour apart. When we were done before that time, there was always record keeping, phone calls, reading etc. that we could do to fill in until the next scheduled visit! Incidentally, charting and reporting time should be considered part of the time charged for the visit! Winnie *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html