In today’s challenging environment, administrators and providers face many challenges from patient satisfaction to effective charge capture. Charge capture is a crucial part of revenue cycle process and healthcare organizations that do not address insufficient or incorrect charge capture, are leaving money on the table.
Healthcare organizations must focus on charge capture and charge audit. They need to establish a clear and consistent audit program to identify trends and uncover problem areas and take the necessary steps in correcting the problem. If they do not realize they are what is missing, they will keep making the same mistake over and over.
Lack of charge-capture program can have a significant impact on healthcare organizations bottom line. Many organizations neglect to focus on this aspect of the coding and billing process because claims are being submitted and paid. Also, they are overlooking missed, incorrect, and inconsistent charges which leads to loss of revenue.
Effectiveness of Charge Capture
A strong clinical chart auditing program will ensure sound documentation, improving healthcare organizations ability to capture missed revenue, reduce denials and improve patient care. Healthcare organizations need to identify potential areas of charge-capture to significantly improve revenue. Healthcare organizations need to:
· Perform charge-capture audits on all revenue generating clinical departments.
· Verify that charges represent services rendered to the patient are accurate and are ordered by physician.
· Identify and correcting any discrepancies.
· Maintaining and/or developing Charging Protocols and Policies in all revenue producing departments.
· Provide education regarding charge/billing guidelines.
Regardless of each organizational approach, revenue recovery and charge capture can make a substantial and significant impact to the facilities bottom-line. Every revenue generating department must properly document and record charges to establish control mechanisms to ensure that appropriate procedures and charging protocol are being followed thereby maintaining a healthy economic environment.
A Medical Chart Auditor with strong clinical and billing experience can play a significant role in identifying, correcting, and improving the recovery of lost revenue process within your healthcare facility/organization.
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