How can hospitals improve charge capture?
Hospital charge capture is an important part of the revenue cycle process. Most organizations that provide health services have the challenge of dementing information accurately on the care they provide and this leads them to lose millions of money. We are going to; tips on how these institutions can improve the hospital charge capture.
Leveraging IT systems
IT systems can be leveraged to drop charges automatically when possible. There is now a possibility of organizations that provide health care services to leverage any information related to health and drop a charge automatically.
Educate employees
The current procedural terminology codes and rules for CMS change regularly and complex areas such as radiology and cardiology need employees to be up to date. For example, things you charge, for now, you may not be able to charge for in two months to come. The frequent changes in the health sector need the organizations that provide the services to focus on training employees on CPT changes.
Getting documented processes
For hospital charge capture to be successful at any given hospital, there needs to be process-bridge between what is intended to engender financially and what is happening clinically. All this can be formalized with proper representation of the service line clinical at the revenue cycle in order to steer and reflect in the system.
Deployment of consistent charge standards in all departments
There should be central charging policies in hospitals to make sure that the structure is consistent. This makes it easy for people to understand and help out each other.
Including communications in the processes
Communication is the pillar of every organization and it is recommended for hospitals to have communication processes that can link teams that are part of the hospital charge capture such as the charge description master, the clinical departments and billing. The teams for the organization should also come together regularly and discuss the hospital charge capture. This will ensure that there is an identification of missing and incorrect charges.
Investing in the hospital charge capture system itself
Hospitals may adopt EMR integrated solutions and various applications to identify and capture charges appropriately. Many organizations will have to rely on paper-based methods of capturing charges if they don’t invest. The paper-based methods are not efficient enough. The applications should allow the organization to identify what has been billed on time and what is missing. They will also provide various methods for checking the completeness and the accuracy of the billing.
Performing regular audits
Hospitals can achieve correct charges for every patient if they perform regular audits on the billing systems in various departments such as the emergency department, admission department and many more. The audits should have a professional and technical component and this will make sure that all charges are reported and billed accurately.
Reviewing the billing workflow
Hospitals should find out different streams of revenue such as the ancillaries, pharmacy, acute and ambulatory. The workflow should make sure that the right charge is timely identified.
DocCharge Company helps hospitals to improve on their charge capture technologies. The company provides the necessary apps, information and consultancy services to ensure physicians deliver their best.
DocCharge
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