At one Florida facility, Broward Health Medical Center, there were 1,285 trauma activation cases in 2019 with no admission - almost equal to the number that led to admissions. The portion of Florida trauma activation cases without an admission rose from 22% in 2012 to 27% last year, according to the data. Recently “we saw a trauma activation fee where the patient walked into the ER” and walked out soon afterward, she said. “We do see quite a bit of non-appropriate trauma charges - more than you’d see five years ago,” said Pat Palmer, co-founder of Beacon Healthcare Costs Illuminated, which analyzes thousands of bills for insurers and patients. Those fees, which can exceed $50,000 per patient, are billed on top of what hospitals charge for emergency medical care. The idea is that life-threatening injuries need immediate attention and that designated trauma centers should be able to recoup the cost of having a team ready - even if it never swings into action.
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Hospitals can charge trauma activation fees when a crack squad of doctors and nurses assembles after an ambulance crew says it’s approaching with a patient who needs trauma care. “It’s being taken advantage of” and such cases are “way more numerous” than a few years ago, she said. “Some hospitals are using it as a revenue generator,” Tami Rockholt, a registered nurse and medical claims consultant who appeared as an expert witness in the Sutter Health car-accident trial, said in an interview. While false alarms are to be expected, such frequent charges for little if any treatment suggest some hospitals see the alerts as much as a money spigot as a clinical emergency tool, claims consultants say. Those cases accounted for more than a quarter of all the state’s trauma team activations that year and were more than double the number of similar cases in 2014, according to an all-payer database of hospital claims kept by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration. In Florida alone, where the number of trauma centers has exploded, hospitals charged such fees more than 13,000 times in 2019 even though the patient went home the same day, according to a KHN analysis of state data provided by Etienne Pracht, an economist at the University of South Florida. Tens of thousands of times a year, hospitals charge enormously expensive trauma alert fees for injuries so minor the patient is never admitted. The case, buried in the records of a 2017 trial, is a rare example of a courtroom challenge to something billing consultants say is increasingly common at U.S.
Sutter Health Memorial Medical Center charged $44,914 including an $8,928 “trauma alert” fee, billed for summoning the hospital’s top surgical specialists and usually associated with the most severely injured patients. A hospital in Modesto, California, treated a 30-year-old man for shoulder and back pain after a car accident.
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