Emergentology (Emergency Medicine; the Professional Component): Board Certified and Board Prepared emergency medicine physicians. Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. strives to employ residency trained, AOBEM or ABEM board certified or prepared emergency physicians. Occasionally, group members are highly qualified, emergency medicine experienced physicians that originally trained in other disciplines such as Internal Medicine. Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. also employs ER experienced, highly motivated physician assistants and nurse practitioners who function as physician extenders. These midlevel providers are highly skilled and trained and are able to handle complicated medical cases with input from the physicians working with them side by side. All physicians and midlevel providers are well grounded in state of the art emergency medicine and customer service oriented practice standards. Intrinsic Education: All providers are encouraged to obtain annual continuing medical education and Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. reimburses each employee up to $2000 of these annual costs. Additionally, we offer six or more accredited continuing medical educational lectures each year during our group meetings. Group members are encouraged to join and participate in local and national professional and specialty college related organizations. Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. employs an education expert who not only provides much of the American Heart Association certificated courses for the group, (ACLS, BTLS, PALS, etc.), but also oversees and coordinates our internal education program, QA and customer satisfaction program. Mandatory Customer Service, and Medical Quality Standards training is conducted annually. Specific educational needs are identified and addressed through our QA procedures on a regular basis. Emergency medicine standards are addressed and taught via Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. policies and procedures in an effort to establish a high level of consistent baseline of knowledge, skills and performance across our group of physicians and midlevel providers. Extrinsic Education: Through our Educator, we offer ACLS, BTLS, PALS, Triage, Critical Thinking, Emergency Nursing and other courses to hospital nurses, area paramedics and medical staff members where appropriate. Several of our providers lecture and teach in these courses. We are able to offer American Heart Association and ACEP cert courses to the entire nursing and medical staff of the hospitals with which we hold ER contracts. Our goal is to offer these services as a courtesy to the hospital whenever possible. Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. also has expertise in establishing code committees, code teams and ED Improvement Committees. Public education is afforded through our CPR classes and the interactive Message Board on our web site, www.phoenixemergencygroup.org. Pre Hospital Medical Direction and Education: Several group physicians are experienced in and enthusiastic about pre hospital medical direction and education. The Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. Educator is well known across Arizona as a superb pre hospital educator and is in high demand for this service. He is also nationally recognized by the American Heart Association and by the National and International BTLS organizations. Emergency Department Design and Flow: Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. leadership has studied the problems associated with emergency department inefficiencies and physical plant design flaw issues related to optimal patient care and movement through the department. This has led to the development of a melding of architectural design and EM practice philosophy that we hope will one day redefine the practicalities of emergency medical services within hospitals. Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement: Medical quality of care and customer satisfaction issues are identified by several means and handled directly at the time of discovery. Problems are then trended and education of individuals and/or the group as a whole is conducted. Repeat trending is observed and anticipated improvement documented. This process is repeated until the problems are fully corrected. Issues are identified through the hospital's routine QA mechanisms as well as from our own patient call back program. Phoenix Emergency Group employs customer satisfaction surveyors who perform call backs on nearly 100% of the patients seen in the ER. Billing: Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. utilizes a highly reputable and experienced ER billing firm, Applied Reimbursement Techniques. A.R.T. is consistently compliant and current with all CMS rules and regulations and has provided our group with excellent service for several years. Phoenix Emergency Group, Inc. employs documentation/Charting QA specialists that perform 100% review of all charts on a daily basis prior to sending them to the billing company for processes. This not only benefits Phoenix Emergency Group, but also decreases the amount of charting deficiencies, thereby dramatically lessening the work load of the hospital's Medical Records Department. We efficiently use state of the art scanning and file transfer sending the medical records electronically to the billing company. We use secure servers and FTP sites to ensure complete HIPPA compliance.