Medicare Observation

Thank you both for your comments. As you have both mentioned the Medicare rule for observation is very complex and confusing. The intention of the rule is to set clinical criteria for observation, and rapidly discharge the patient in twenty-four hours. However, this does not always happen. Some observation patients can stay up to ninety-six hours before being discharged or switched to observation status. One of the problems is individual health care organization interprets the Medicare rule differently. Then if the patient had a managed care Medicare carrier, the rules may be different. This makes observation status for an organization nightmare to manage (Hockenberry, Parlato, & Ross, 2014). What I find even worse, observation increases the