Best practices for hospital charge capture

Physicians’ practices strive to succeed in the medical industry. Nowadays reimbursements are decreasing and the cost of new drugs increasing. There should be hospital charge capture best practices in place for essential practices to succeed. Every physician will tell you that the charge capture is a very important process for there to be a prevention of loss of charges for the services provided.

Many medical institutions think that their processes are efficient enough to capture all the missed charges and errors. There might still be opportunities to refine the process further and make the system perfect by adopting hospital charge capture best practices.

There are superior tools that can help to analyze all drug inventory movement from the purchase time until the time when a reimbursement is being submitted. The inventory roll-forward is a robust method to enable efficient charge capture. It helps to capture what happens between the business office and the encounter form. It also accounts for different things the pharmacy and the nursing staff would never see.

It is beneficial to use some type of analysis that looks at the purchase, inventory, and charges on a regular basis. This will ensure that there is accurate charge capture. Software programs have been developed to evaluate the charge capture accuracy. Such software takes into account the purchases, the beginning inventory and the ending inventory and then compares with what was used to what is actually being charged.

This process can help physicians to know every month they missed charging for a drug and go back to recapture the lost charges.

One of the main advantages is how the program for charge capture can be used in various departments to achieve one main goal and ensure that there is efficient and effective revenue collection. Many times, billing office and nurses work independently and this fosters teamwork between different departments. This reduces understand of how everyone plays a role in the success of the process.

The main challenge in the Inventory Roll-Forward analysis is the conversion of purchased units to billing units. The mathematical calculations are not that complex because automated excel spreadsheet has got the necessary formulas to do various conversions and this makes the processes accurate. These are one of the hospital charge capture best practices. Some physicians have already adopted software for these processes and there are those that totally rely on the automated software to help them convert purchased units into billable units.

The process starts by downloading monthly drug purchases into a spreadsheet and adding them to the begging of the month inventory for each medicine. The ending inventory for the month is then subtracted from the available quantity and any transfers in and out of the stock are accounted for. The results represent what would have been billed for that particular month. There is another tool that can be used to track down variances and this is the log for drug compensated, the drugs wasted and the drugs non-compensated. 
  

Physicians can get more tips on how to charge capture from the DocCharge website. DocCharge is a company that has invested on how to increase the productivity of physicians.
DocCharge Website : http://doccharge.com/

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