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?

We break this question into two parts — soundness and consistency — for good reasons:

First, in an era of increased public price scrutiny, hospital CFOs must ensure that their chargemasters are defensible and can be clearly explained to outside observers and auditors.

Second, mergers, acquisitions and other affiliations often bring under a single umbrella organizations that may have very different pricing and coding methodologies, practices and strategies.