Many states require death certificates to be completed within 72 hours, and some, such as South Carolina, impose administrative penalties on doctors who fail to comply.
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Under Georgian law, funeral directors must complete their portion of the death certificate – including the deceased’s demographic information – within 72 hours. However, doctors have up to 30 days to certify death.
That’s too long a wait for families, say critics.
“We’ve been talking about how to speed up the system for a while,” said Rick Williams, R-Milledgeville MP, who runs a funeral home and crematorium in his hometown. “Often we are just trying to track down a doctor.”
The time it takes to fill out death certificates is an issue that funeral homes across the state have raised against the state’s largest medical advocacy group, the Medical Association of Georgia. (Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@ajc.com)
Photo credit: Alyssa Pointer/Alyssa.Pointer@ajc.com
Photo credit: Alyssa Pointer/Alyssa.Pointer@ajc.com
The problem has put funeral directors across the state against the largest medical advocacy group in the state, the Medical Association of Georgia.
The funeral directors support the legislation Williams put in place in the previous session, HB 135. This would have severely limited the time doctors had to determine and prompted immediate complaints to the Georgia Composite Medical Board if a doctor broke the law.
The funeral industry is financially involved in the matter as some families denied access to assets cannot reimburse them for funeral services.
“We’ve been talking about how to speed up the system for a while. Often we are just trying to track down a doctor. “
– Rep. Rick Williams, R-Milledgeville, who runs a funeral home
The Medical Association of Georgia is about ensuring that doctors continue to use professional judgment to determine the cause of death and sign a death certificate. In some cases, doctors did not see the patient for long periods of time before death, said Bethany Sherrer, MAG legal advisor.
A doctor determines the cause of death based on a number of factors including their medical training, medical knowledge, the patient’s available medical history, symptoms, and test results.
“One concern is that signing a death certificate could have ramifications without having the correct information before it is complete,” Sherrer said.
The debate is expected to heat up soon.
State Representative Sharon Cooper R-Marietta, Chair of the Georgia House of Representatives Committee on Health and Human Services, has vowed to address the issue in the upcoming legislature.
She plans to invite funeral directors, doctors, and MAG members to come up with solutions.
“We’re all going to get everyone in the room and talk about it,” said Cooper, “which I’ve found to be one of the most effective ways to solve a problem.”
Track down
Concerns can arise when medical personnel have little information about a patient and the conditions associated with death. Sometimes people suddenly die in the emergency room, barely giving doctors details to help determine a cause of death.
Doctors who provide general medical care to hospital patients can also be more difficult to pinpoint because they can move between hospitals.
However, few excuses could be made to explain the cause of the delay in obtaining Sandra Autry’s husband’s death certificate.
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He was in the hospice and a decision from the attending physician shouldn’t have taken more than a month, said Cy Hume, co-owner of the AS Crernatory and Crematory funeral home in Decatur, which arranged her husband’s funeral and memorial services.
Instead, she let go of hospice workers telling her every day to call a different satellite office where the doctor was supposed to work that day. When she called this office, she said she had been told he was in a different office.
At the same time she was making these calls, an outside administrator from the funeral home was also trying to reach the doctor.
The death from natural causes was finally confirmed on May 21st. That afternoon, Hume, the funeral director, arrived at Autry’s doorstep to give her the document.
Behind the scenes, however, the undertaker hadn’t stopped jumping through hoops.
Modernize death
To make it official, he had to fax the document to DeKalb County, where a vital signs clerk typed the cause of death into the Georgia Vital Events Registration System, or GAVERS, Peach State’s only system of all vital signs information. The web-based application is configured to share data on births, deaths, fetal deaths, abortion, marriages and divorces with state and federal agencies.
The whole rigmarol would not have been necessary, said Hume, “if the doctor had done it through GAVERS from the start.”
However, many doctors are not registered to use the system.
In 2011, the state spent $ 1.45 million buying GAVERS. But while it has 3,065 active users, a decade later there are only 92 individual doctors with user identifications, state officials said.
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In most other cases where doctors electronically certified deaths, they had records completed in accordance with legal requirements.
The concern is that many doctors still rely on fax to file medical certificates with funeral directors, who are then responsible for delivering the document to the county health department which puts it in GAVERS.
“What would be helpful is that doctors are encouraged to log into their offices to learn how to use GAVERS and then start using it,” said Eddie Dressler, owner of Dressler’s Jewish Funeral Care in Atlanta.
One issue that should be explored is why more doctors are not registered with GAVERS, suggested Sherrer, MAG legal advisor.
She wondered if there were any obstacles for doctors not to use the electronic system. Is it why doctors don’t know about it, or is it a workflow problem that somehow can be resolved?
Small consequences
Several funeral directors told the AJC they filed several complaints against doctors with the Georgia Composite Medical Board to encourage compliance.
However, according to Hume, complaints are almost always rejected with little consequence for doctors.
Williams, the Milledgeville legislature, said he filed a complaint that dragged on for three months. When the board held a hearing about it, the doctor had signed the certificate and the case was settled. No disciplinary action was taken, Williams said.
“They let us know if we could be of any further help, please let us know,” said Williams, “but they didn’t do anything to the doctor who caused this death certificate just to sit there, which is something of the family was such a difficult time. ” . ”
The subject was not a “major focus” for the medical board, said LaSharn Hughes, its chief executive officer.
Meanwhile, Sandra Autry has an appointment on June 3 to speak with the U.S. Social Security Agency and transfer her husband’s benefits in her name.
She had feared the conversation last week and knew it would not have gone anywhere without the medical certificate. Now, she said, she can finally begin to put her life back in order.
“Hopefully social security will change this to his social security instead of mine. ”
