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SBAR stands for Situation, Background, Assessment and Recomendation and is pronounced "S - BAR." SBAR is a standard format initially utilized by nurses to bring a physician up to speed on a problem.   At some point in time, it was realized that nurses and physicians...

SOAP stands for Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan.  It is a standard format for documenting a patient encounter and can be used both for face-to-face encounters as well as triage phone calls. Subjective = what the patient reports as the problem, symptoms,...

Two acronyms that confused me early on in my career were "H & P" and "HNP" because they sound exactly the same and few people enunciate clearly enough to distinguish the difference.  The context will tell you the difference, but for anyone new to healthcare the...

Prothrombin time (PT) evaluates the ability of blood to clot properly, it can be used to help diagnose bleeding.  The PT may be ordered when a patient who is not taking anti-coagulant drugs has signs or symptoms of a bleeding disorder, which can range from nosebleeds,...

Considered by many to be the most useful and realistic management theory ever, MBWA is the concept that you need to be present in the area you are managing to be an effective manager.  MBWA includes: making rounds in every area several times daily touching base with...

Accounts Receivable, abbreviated and called "A.R." and written as "A/R" is the money due to a healthcare organization for services provided.  For most cash-based non-hospital practices, the A/R works as follows: When a service is provided to a patient, the charges are...

When a claim is adjudicated, the payer (or possibly the Third Party Administrator) applies a series of payment rules such as: the subscriber or beneficiary's eligibility to receive benefits whether the services provided are covered under the subscriber's plan the...

Social media is media designed to be distributed through social interaction using Internet and web-based technologies.  Social media use is said to be the defining factor in the idea that the current period in time will be defined as the "Attention Age." Wikipedia...

An ACO is an organized group of hospitals and physicians that together assume shared risk around the care it provides to patients. For a review of the pros, cons and new twists in ACOs, read the article here.