So how does the healthcare industry make sense of all these moving parts in order to bill for services accurately? Let’s get into how this works in more detail.
Medical Codes
In an effort to help standardize charges across the wide spectrum of providers and services in healthcare, medical coding is being used. This means that for certain procedures, or reasons for visits, standardized medical codes will be input to help denote to the provider and insurance company what is being charged for. These medical codes are kept in databases between the providers and the insurance companies in order to bill patients for services or products rendered.
The person that monitors these codes and charges is called a chargemaster. It is their job to find inaccuracies or to fix badly inputted charges in order to correct billing mistakes. Chargemasters try to do all they can to help avoid mistakes happening in the first place as mistakes can cost patients and providers and health insurance companies quite a bit of money with all of the millions of patients involved.
Since most charge codes are stored in a database, there are some really awesome chargemaster management solutions that use technology to scour the database for bad entries in order to help find them before they get sent to customers and providers as bills. This can help providers to avoid missing out on revenue. It also helps to build trust between providers and patients when things are more accurate. As you can see, better chargemaster management can help any provider and health insurance company to keep things more accurate and transparent to patients.
