Case 2 - 6 Chargemaster Maintenance
What plan would you come up with?
The chargemaster is one of the most important financial aspect of a healthcare facility or hospital because the amounts listed on the chargemaster is what is charged to the patients. If the chargemaster has the wrong amounts on there, the hospital will be either losing revenue is the costs are lower than what they should be or they will be overcharging the patient. This will also be viewed as committing fraud against CMS and the hospital will ultimately be held responsible and would have to incur fines and penalties. A chargemaster automatically charges patients for all types of services, procedures, supplies and even medications that are provided from a list of prices
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Problem – The reason that she quit was because she was frustrated with her job.
Solution – Rather than getting frustrated and quitting, she should have approached her manager with her concerns and discuss possible solutions that could have taken place in order to rectify the situation.
Since there are thousands of different costs on the chargemaster, it really is a process in of itself to keep checking to see what prices have changed where. This is where the IT department can come in help speed up the process of finding out what changes were made to the costs and inform the proper manager of the changes being made to the chargemaster. The IT department can get the costs from CMS and run it against the chargemaster using the code set that is used for the various items listed.
This query can be done on a monthly basis and the IT department can provide the change report to the appropriate department, as well as the assistance director of HIM and Billing. With CMS coming out with new rules and code sets, it is imperative for the chargemaster to portray all the changes that are being made when the changes are reported from