Fine-tune your charity care policy with these 10 steps
Health Care Auditing Strategies, July 1, 2006
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As the number of uninsured Americans continues to climb each year, the burden on providers to update, tweak, or rewrite their charity care policies grows as well. But Joyce Sourbeck, MS, RN, assistant vice president of revenue cycle at Washington, DC Hospital Center (WHC), says that when providers reevaluate their existing programs, they often overlook the most important areas.
Sourbeck suggests following these 10 steps when revisiting your facility's policy each year:
1. Define your methodology. You need to decide, and document, whether you'll use a sliding scale, flat-rate discount, or percentage of Medicare when determining charity care eligibility in relation to the federal poverty guidelines (FPG). And you must decide what percentage of the FPG you will use for the top of your scale. The federal poverty guideline for 2006 is $13,200 for a family of two and $9,800 for one person. "That's not very much. So if you just went on that alone, you can see how people would fall through the cracks," says Sourbeck.
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