As you probably know, chargemasters can quickly become outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete without regular maintenance. Unfortunately, today, managing hospital chargemasters has become incredibly difficult. Not only must you try your best to keep it up-to-date, but you must also deal with new transparency policies. Here are some of the top things that make managing chargemasters difficult but that you must overcome to maintain patient satisfaction.
- Lack of Resources for Maintenance
Maintaining a chargemaster is something that requires plenty of resources, people, and time. Unfortunately, this means that some of the codes on your chargemaster can quickly become outdated. The result is that many hospitals slip when it comes to maintenance, resulting in lost revenue and compliance problems. Fortunately, plenty of automated management systems are being developed, which can help reduce the number of resources required for this basic maintenance.
- Missing Charges
Missing charges are a significant problem that is actually quite frequently found in hospitals due to poor chargemaster management. This often comes because the entirety of services provided to a patient is not reported, which leads to lost revenue. Other times, you may have missing charges because your chargemaster doesn’t report the services provided correctly. Either way, this is often directly connected to a lack of chargemaster maintenance and cannot be remedied until the root cause is addressed.
- Price Transparency
Another thing that is a big challenge for hospitals today is price transparency. So, patients and the government often turn to a chargemaster to see a hospital’s prices. However, these documents do not give off a uniform set of information, which can be misleading and create issues with recent demands for price transparency. Creating a truly transparent document includes having information about data elements, file formats, location, accessibility, updates, and applicability.
- Lack of Clinical Participation
Chargemasters must be properly managed to avoid any billing complications. However, getting a hospital to participate in this management procedure isn’t easy since they likely won’t budget and pay for crucial services, such as chargemaster consulting. Additionally, an experienced team is necessary to keep the chargemaster up-to-date. Until more hospital staff realize how crucial chargemasters are for facility operations, this will remain a problem.
Hospitals need to manage their chargemasters if they want to avoid billing issues. That said, this can be a challenging task. These are just some of the challenges that hospital administration faces when it comes to chargemasters.
