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Try these four tips to improve chargemaster accuracy

Health Care Auditing Strategies, February 1, 2006

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Keeping your hospital's chargemaster updated with the latest codes and services requires vigilance from your facility's staff. To ensure compliance, verify that your hospital's personnel follows best practices. John Settlemyer, MBA/MHA, director of financial services/chargemaster for Carolinas Healthcare System in Charlotte, NC, and Mark Dietz, RHIA, a healthcare management consultant from Golden Valley, MN, have provided four tips to help with your facility's chargemaster auditing and year-round maintenance efforts:

Tip #1: Keep up with quarterly OPPS releases.

Be sure to monitor the quarterly CMS transmittals that update the outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS).

Settlemyer recommends designating at least one person at your facility to read these transmittals to determine whether there are new codes, coding changes, or directives that alter billing and compliance. Ideally, this one person should be in charge of managing changes to the chargemaster.

"A [chargemaster] director or coordinator is an information 'clearinghouse,' if you will, who makes sure that the information gets to the people who need to know it, and then makes sure the changes get made," Settlemyer says. "It also takes a unique person who is dedicated to shepherding the process."

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