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A healthcare organization can significantly improve its billing office's performance by implementing an automated charge-processing system that integrates scanning technology with hospital and physician office billing systems. Such a system offers large healthcare organizations a means to eliminate costly and inefficient manual processing of paper charge sheets, thereby improving productivity and accuracy.
An automated charge-processing system allows a billing department to automatically post, track, monitor, control, and reconcile all charges through a central database. To implement the system, a healthcare organization should assemble a project team composed of representatives from information services, the software supplier, and the organization's business offices. The team will be responsible for setting up the system; designing an easily scannable, standard charge form; establishing the rules the system will follow for posting charges; and designing billing office reports.
Many large healthcare organizations, such as regional IDSs and multihospital systems, continue to absorb the high costs of manually processing thousands of physician and hospital charges each month. In a typical health system's hospital billing department, for example, charge-processing staff must perform the following manual functions daily:
* Reconcile charge sheets with census reports;
* Query clinical staff for missing information;
* Detach and forward copies of charges to the physician billing office;
* Post facility charges into the hospital billing system;
* Post the diagnosis code into the medical record abstracting system;
* Post all coding and abstracted information into billing systems;
* Review an accounts-not-billed report and follow up on outstanding charge information; and
* File charge information.
The health system's physician billing office, in turn, must:
* Await manual delivery of the carbon copies of charges from the hospital department;
* Sort charges by date of service;
* Batch and log charges;
* Post charges into the physician billing system;
* Enter completed charge information on the charge log; and
* File charge information.
An automatic charge-processing system can eliminate or facilitate many of these steps. The system uses software that enables billing office staff to assemble a comprehensive, rapidly accessible data repository for all charges processed by a health system's various billing departments.
Advantages
An on-line charge-processing system automatically reconciles charge data and prompts clinical users for all requisite charge information. Thus, billing staff are relieved of having...