Charge Description Best Practices

Does your hospital have a clear and definitive policy for charge descriptions? Hospitals and health systems are often challenged by how they should address billing descriptions, and consultants may overlook the importance of quality descriptors for long-term file management.

CMS Guidance for Implants

Charging policies for implanted devices have long posed a challenge for hospital CDM management. The latest guidance from CMS aims to simplify revenue code assignment by introducing a more standardized interpretation of implant devices.

HIS Implementation: Charge Data Mistakes & Safeguards

More and more hospitals are pursuing hospital information system (HIS) conversions, and there is a growing trend of inaccurate chargemaster (CDM) data left in the wake. This article highlights frequently encountered systems implementation mistakes that may be placing your charge data integrity at risk.

Chargemaster Spring Cleaning Tips

It’s time to revisit your organization’s charge management priorities now that the busy first quarter is behind us. Here are seven easy “spring cleaning” tips that result in dramatic, strategic improvements.

Mergers + Acquisitions: Is Your Chargemaster Strategy Sound?

Expansion—through mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and other strategic partnerships—has become an important tool in a hospital’s strategic wheelhouse. As your footprint expands to encompass the entire continuum of care, how do you ensure your chargemaster strategy is sound and consistent?

How to Rationalize Chargemaster Prices

Have you ever wondered how hospital prices became so irrational? As is often the case, things changed incrementally. Hospitals and healthcare systems have experienced years of inadequate inflationary update factors, often reduced by factors such as presumed over-coding under the federal inpatient and outpatient prospective payment systems.

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Panacea Unveils Comprehensive Summary of 2021 OPPS Final Rule

Following the recent unveiling by federal officials of the 2021 Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) Final Rule, Panacea Healthcare Solutions has created a comprehensive Final Rule Summary highlighting some of the most salient looming changes facing healthcare providers nationwide.

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CMS and AMA Fourth Quarter 2020 Coding Updates: Panacea Summary and Recommendations

Our revenue integrity team continually monitors announcements by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the American Medical Association (AMA) to bring you the most current and up-to-date coding and billing information. Since our last quarterly update, CMS and AMA have been actively publishing new information that hospitals and providers will need to review to ensure that claims coding and billing are appropriate, based upon the timing of the implementation for these updates.

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Are You Reconciling Your Laboratory Orderables to Your Chargemaster? A How-To in 4 Steps

Over the last several months we’ve seen an uptick in requests from clients nationwide for help reconciling laboratory orderables to chargemasters. In case you’re in this same boat, we wanted to provide some insight into the steps you should be taking. Learn more

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Coding and Reimbursement Highlights for 2020 IPPS, MPFS & OPPS

With the CMS Final Rule published there is a flurry of activity across the industry to come up to speed on the changes. In our experience though we’ve found that for many healthcare systems it’s easier to keep track of changes to the codes, rules, and guidelines they are already using; the challenge comes in becoming aware of and implementing when new things are introduced. Learn more