Corporate Compliance

Step-by-step review of one-day stays

Healthcare Auditing Weekly, January 2, 2007

Auditing one-day stays can be easy with the help of a step-by-step guide. This is the first of a two-part series that will teach you how to audit one-day inpatient stays.

Use the following steps to perform the audit:

1. Enlist the help of your organization's utilization review department.

2. Pull any of your organization's policies on monitoring one-day stays.

3. Find out how your organization's utilization review department is managing these patients.

4. Obtain data from the hospital's accounts receivable system.

Collect the following information:

  • Account balance
  • Admit day
  • Diagnosis related group (DRG) assigned
  • Discharge date
  • Discharge disposition code
  • Financial class
  • Hospital service
  • Inpatient/outpatient indicator
  • Last activity date
  • Medical record
  • Patient account
  • Social security number
  • Total adjustments
  • Total charges
  • Total payments

    Stay tuned for next week, when we will reveal the final six steps in conducting an audit of one-day inpatient stays.

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