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PMMC Healthcare Revenue Cycle Blog
Stay up to date on best practices for healthcare revenue cycle management with PMMC's blog.
From Dollars to Sense: Strategic Pricing Key Challenges and Solutions
Of the various factors that impact your healthcare organization’s profitability, pricing is an often overlooked lever that you have control over. Even those healthcare organizations that do address pricing sometimes undermine their strategic pricing strategies by failing to address lesser-of-charge clauses or skipping the charge description master (CDM) modeling process, which can wreak havoc on their bottom line. The price transparency mandate added another layer of complexity, as raising prices to eliminate lower reimbursement may have adverse effects.
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The Ultimate Guide to Your Next Chargemaster Review
The Chargemaster (CDM) review is one of the most important initiatives for a hospital prior to the new fiscal year and requires a balancing act between price transparency demands and net revenue impact. It's a huge undertaking and if you manage the Chargemaster at your hospital, your team is likely small with limited resources. This action plan is designed to help guide the way and ensure your next Chargemaster review is successful!
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Can You Lower Hospital Chargemaster Prices Without Sacrificing Net Revenue? You Might Be Surprised
Executives in the healthcare industry are constantly looking for more accurate ways to manage and balance their pricing strategies.
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Chargemaster | Price Transparency | chargemaster review | defensible pricing
Why Hospitals Should Stop Automatic Chargemaster Increases
Hopefully your hospital's pricing strategy doesn't sound like this: “Prices were set in cement a long time ago and just keep going up almost automatically.” This was one Chief Financial Officer’s explanation of Chargemaster prices from the controversial 2013 Time Magazine article “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.” The article highlighted the extreme cases of high prices at hospitals and even called several hospitals (by name) into question. Although some of the findings in the report were later disputed, the article placed hospital pricing under a microscope and reinforced the need for defensible pricing. Automatic price increases might be the traditional route, but the strategy opens itself up to scrutiny, inefficiencies, and a potential loss in net revenue. Because of these factors and the recent emphasis on increased price transparency and defensible pricing, hospitals are moving away from the "across the board" annual gross price increase and towards a modeling approach to predict how charge adjustments impact net revenue. Not only does this give finance a clearer picture of future net revenue, it creates a defensible pricing strategy if prices ever come into question.
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Chargemaster | chargemaster review
Steps for Planning a Chargemaster Review
Hospital pricing has come under intense scrutiny over the past several years, from both government legislation and media attention. The pinnacle of the media coverage came in 2013 when Time Magazine released “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.” The article highlighted the extreme cases of high prices at hospitals (i.e. patients getting charged $1.50 for single aspirin or $74 for a roll of gauze). Because of the recent pressure towards increased priced transparency and defensible pricing, hospitals are moving away from the traditional annual gross price increase.
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