Charge Capture is always essential to maximizing revenues and enhancing hospitals overall financial performance. Properly capturing charges can significantly increase the revenue and reduce the delayed payments/ long accounts receivable cycle.
The financial success of any hospital or healthcare facility is dependent upon accurately charging clients for the services that have received. “Recovery of lost revenue” or “Charge Capture” should be an important part of any healthcare organization.
Unfortunately, many hospitals and healthcare providers consider this task as just another cost of doing business or view this process as low priority administrative function without any centralized process or standards in entering charges and do not give it the high priority that it should be given. Hospitals and healthcare providers lose millions of dollars every year due to mismanagement of the billing process. This ranges from inaccurate charging, such as undercharging for a service or procedure or missing a charge altogether.
Medical Chart Audit should be considered an Investment, Not Just a Cost. There are couple ways of ensuring such process one is having Internal Medical Chart Audit staff or if as a healthcare organization hiring more staff is not feasible due to costs and labor, then outsourcing should be considered utilizing an experienced Medical Chart firm.
Regardless of approach, a properly trained Medical Chart Auditor with a strong clinical and billing experience assisting the appropriate department managers and nursing departments with maintaining and/or developing Charging Protocols and Policies in all revenue producing departments can play a significant role in identifying, correcting and improving the charge capture and recovery of lost revenue process within a hospital and healthcare providers.