HR Manager
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Dear Circles of the Sun, I am the HR Manager for San Francisco Emergency Medical Associates and came across your post recently. I am sorry that you had a terrible experience upon leaving the hospital. Even though your post is from about 1.5 years ago, I would like to try to help you and your followers better understand how the hospital billing system works (at least in California).

SFEMA is an independent company that contracts with Sutter hospitals in the area, so our physicians are not employees of the hospital. As a matter of fact, all the physicians that see patients in California hospitals that are not actually employees of the hospital. In California, hospitals are legally not allowed to employ physicians to render medical care to patients. When a patient is seen by an SFEMA physician in the ER, the time they spend working on your case (diagnosing, reviewing scan/test results, etc.) is billed separately then your other ER services (ER bed, tests, etc.) provided directly by the hospital.

As you can imagine, patient billing is a massive project, so we outsource that to professional third-party billing company (McKesson) based in Florida, which is the company that sends the invoices to patients and collects payments on SFEMA’s behalf. Unfortunately, there is no way of sending bills bundled with the Sutter bills sent to patients. I completely understand that is frustrating and confusing. We also have no control over what information is posted on the hospital’s website about the billing; however, if you can see they have included a section about receiving separate physician bills: http://www.cpmc.org/services/pfs.html

Finally, the phone operators at the hospital are basically just trained to give out phone numbers/transfer calls and don’t really know the nuances of each individual physician’s practice/billing. It is not ideal, but we hope this will be remedied in the future.

I hope that helps to clarify what happened and hopefully help someone in the future.

)