Implementation of Billing for Patient Portal Messages as E-Visits in a Large Integrated Health System.

Background: Patient-provider communication through the patient portal has markedly increased in recent years. Some health care facilities implemented programs to enable providers to bill for responding to patient-initiated messages that require substantive medical decision making through an e-visit.

Objective: To evaluate the effect of billing eligible patient-initiated portal messages as e-visits using a mixed-methods approach.

Using Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services care compare data to create hospital-acquired infection count thresholds: a SAS program and analysis.

Using the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) program shared here, all US hospitals can calculate hospital-specific hospital-acquired infection threshold counts for achieving a pre-specified benchmarked Standardized Infection Ratio performance percentile.