Managing your Chargemaster is critical to maintaining compliance, receiving appropriate reimbursement, increasing cash flow, and improving revenues.
After conducting a detailed but important Chargemaster Review, it is essential to manage your Chargemaster to ensure compliance and revenue improvements. Without appropriate oversight, the Chargemaster will not maintain its accuracy, resulting in denied claims, as well as decreased reimbursement and cash flow.
Managing a Chargemaster is challenging, complex, and time-consuming due to many factors including:
- Regulations that change on a daily basis, requiring staff to stay up to date on the changes of multiple payors' and fiscal intermediaries' web sites
- Coding updates that require extensive and specialized clinical knowledge in order to interpret the changes, educate the staff, and modify the associated charging practices
- Knowledge about revenue codes and the impact on billing for services provided
- Implementing regulatory code changes that need to be done on a timely basis in order to capture all relevant charges
- Professional charges that depict the correct place of service codes
- System flags that impact the charging mechanisms
Managing your Chargemaster appropriately and accurately requires in-depth clinical and coding expertise as well as a commitment to:
- Researching and interpreting regulatory changes on a daily basis
- Updating, deleting, and adding new codes on a timely basis
- Adjusting pricing to reflect changes in coding
- Educating staff regarding the charging practices for their departments
- Auditing the previous day's charges to ensure that appropriate billing has occurred for each patient that received services
- Monitoring volume for each service to ensure proper charging practices
MedCom Solutions understands how important the Chargemaster is to the fiscal health of your institution.
With an improved bottom line, your recovered reimbursement can be used to purchase new medical equipment, improve facilities, attract physicians, and increase the quality of care for your patients. The financial impact of a well-managed Chargemaster cannot be underestimated.
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