Hospital Zero-Base Pricing®: A Novel Approach to Establishing Rational Chargemaster Prices

Today’s environment necessitates that healthcare CFOs and financial managers explain, document, and defend the rationale behind their CDM prices. But years of inadequate inflationary update factors based on presumed over-coding under the federal inpatient and outpatient prospective payment systems have hindered the tight operating budget controls and across-the-board price increases to payers that used to allow hospitals to sustain healthy operating margins. In the wake of reimbursement shortfalls, some hospitals optimized their chargemaster prices to subsidize such losses and maintain their financial viability.

Unfortunately, these techniques have largely rendered chargemaster line item prices irrational and indefensible.

Hospital Zero-Base Pricing® establishes prices based on actual unit costs and provides comparisons to local peer prices. Where needed, you can use sophisticated software and analysis to estimate unit costs, which saves the burden and expense of implementing a traditional cost account system.

To learn why your organization should consider a hospital zero-base pricing initiative, download our white paper: “Hospital Zero-Base Pricing®: A Novel Approach to Establishing Rational Chargemaster Prices.”