Medical Recordkeeping

...is a very hot domain for my line of work (building line of business applications). I've never done any work myself in this space, but I've brushed into a few interesting things. At Veterans Affairs I had a coworker who was working on an application that would seize funds from tax returns to doctors who owed Veterans Affairs money! The way these situations would arise is that a patient would visit a doctor, a doctor would get Veterans Affairs to pay for the visit, Veterans Affairs would (after the fact) realize that the doctor should have gotten Medicare to pay for the costs, and would then ask to be reimbursed for the mix-up. If a doctor did not pay up, one recourse the U.S. government had was to seize funds in would-be tax returns! In 2012, I interviewed for a job I did not get at a company which audited the records of client hospitals to try to find individuals who welched on emergency room visits who were covered by Medicare and for whom Medicare could pay their bills. Individuals who get food stamps are in fact covered by Medicare in these scenarios (mostly). If a hospital knows who these parties are, it may recover lost revenue by asking the government to pay instead of the patient.