The field of hospital medicine is only 20 years old. However, it includes more than 50,000 doctors, MDs, DOs, and advanced practitioners. This comparatively small group was at the heart of the United States’ COVID pandemic in 2020. Many hospitalists worked tirelessly to save lives in overcrowded units, separating themselves from family members and facing despair as patients sat by themselves in isolation.
Although the COVID situation is gradually improving within the United States, hospitalist groups are struggling and confronting new challenges. Physician burnout is common, and their finances are a concern for many groups.
Hospital medicine professionals haven’t been more productive or worked longer hours. Yet, their efforts were insufficient to compensate for the absence of elective and procedural revenue for most healthcare institutions.
To aid hospitalist organizations in recovering financial losses, charge capture technology is an essential part of their revenue cycle toolbox. With features specifically designed for hospitals and the distinctive features of hospital admissions, these charge capture systems can effectively prevent the loss of revenue from service.
Effective physician charge capture is crucial for optimizing hospitalist revenue cycle management. By leveraging advanced charge capture technology, healthcare providers can minimize billing errors, ensure accurate documentation, and reduce revenue leakage. This technology streamlines the process by automating coding and claim submissions, allowing physicians to focus more on patient care than administrative tasks.
Some of the key features in a solid and hospitalist-centric charge capture platform that have been proven to improve revenue capture overall and operational efficiencies are:
Rounding List Reconciliation
Electronic rounding lists can effectively create personalized lists for service providers, individually or in a group. If the support staff in the coding department does not have visibility into these lists, ensuring that all charges are captured on multiple days is a problem, mainly when several providers are involved.
Technology that links the appearance of a patient’s list to a potential charge and combines it with coder-specific reconciliation tools that identify the absence of charges helps eliminate revenue.
Payer Alignment
With hospitalists at the forefront of treatment for illness and medicine in a wide range of clinical fields, the potential for them to be affected by the annual changes to code sets and updates to payer rules is significant. Revenue cycle professionals who are wise take the lessons from denials of payers to avoid future denials for the same reasons.
Charge capture systems with customized rules engines will ensure that the charges that meet specific requirements are notified and reviewed before billing to avoid the expense of denial and rework.
Streamlined Back Office Throughput
This is an excellent starting point for teams in the revenue field looking to boost KPI performance throughput. How many charges for patients can an individual team handle daily? If the practice wants to expand? How can a hospitalist team expand without over-tilting into the FTE scales? The use of exception-based workflows is a proven method of increasing efficiency.
Utilizing technology for charge capture to enable fast and accurate charge capture, along with reconciliation and review tools that permit the automatic recognition and payment for “clean” charges, can improve throughput by 50% or more. Only the charges flagged for possible mistakes need to be reviewed, and the rest go to the billing department automatically.
