I may be repeating myself -- if so, please forgive me. Everything they tell
you about your memory going as you get older appears to be true!

At one time, I worked at a community hospital which billed its patients for
presentation at tumor boards. The hospital had originally had no oncologists
on staff, and did not, at that time, have radiation oncology services either.
They had specialists in each discipline come once a week to tumor board from
an area teaching hospital. The premise was that this spared patients the
need to trek from one specialist to another, and to avoid long trips into the
city for consultations and treatments. The oncologist and radiation
oncologist charged the hospital a set fee for each tumor board. The patients
were billed a consultant's fee through their insurance -- the system had been
set up before I began working there, but I would expect that your billing
department could help with setting something like this up.

We did require that at least three patients be discussed at each conference,
which meant that we could cover the costs of the specialists' fees. Patients
who were presented a second time, for follow-up, were charged a lesser fee.
I should also note that the fees charged by the specialists were probably
quite low, even for that time, and must have represented no more than a burp
in their incomes. Knowing what some specialists from other facilities
charged later -- the original oncologist and radiation oncologists were
working more in the interest of the patients than themselves!

Eileen