The funding arrangements in the majority of countries which facilitate reimbursements to medical practitioners employ some form of classification system which directly or indirectly links payments and resource allocation to patient interactions.
From their first day of internship, medical practitioners have simultaneous and inextricably linked clinical and administrative responsibilities which form the basis on which the licence to practice medicine exists. Reimbursement is a component of every encounter between a medical practitioner and a patient. This study reports findings from one country with a mixed public–private health system and a primarily fee-for-service reimbursement model and may therefore not be completely generalisable to other settings. Our study excluded divisions, faculties and chapters which exist under the umbrellas of the specialist medical colleges who were invited to participate however, any impact on our results is likely to be minimal. Since this study, federal government initiatives in relation to the medical education of general practitioners (GPs) has reduced the number of GP postgraduate training providers (referred to in this study as vocational education providers) from the 17 stakeholders included in our study to 11 stakeholders.
Multiple data collection methods (telephone, mail and email) may have elicited some response bias among participants, though this is likely to be negligible. Despite medical billing errors and fraud being a significant problem, and education having been proven as an effective preventative strategy, to our knowledge this is the first study which has attempted to systematically map medical billing education of Australian medical practitioners.
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