Are you recognizing all the Room and Bed charges at your organization? Are you capturing the appropriate amount of chargeable observation hours for a patient? These questions may be difficult to answer if you do not have the data or a report to reference and track within Oracle (Cerner) Millennium®.
One of the most important charges on the inpatient side of a health organization is the Room Care charge, also referred to as the Room and Bed charge. This charge can encompass the utilization of the room and supplies, and in some cases, the Room and Bed charge may be the only chargeable item on a given encounter.
In addition to capturing the Room and Bed charges for credit of the service provided, it is equally important to ensure that you are not overcharging for Room and Bed, leading to downstream fines and penalties. For example, in 2014, the Office of the Inspector General audited New York state, resulting in the state owing the Federal Government $60.8 billion due to claiming unallowable Room and Board charges over a three-year period.
Many factors can cause an organization to miss capturing a Room and Bed Charge, such as the Patient Status Order (PSO) being added to PowerChart®. The PSO orderable allows physicians to make immediate changes to a patient’s encounter via signing an order in PowerChart®. These encounter changes include tasks anywhere from starting or ending observation on a patient’s encounter to admitting a patient from observation simply by completing a PSO to change a patient’s encounter type. A patient’s encounter type, accommodation, time of registration, time of admission and time of discharge are the important factors when determining the appropriate Room and Bed charge for a given encounter. The involvement of the Patient Status Order, which can alter most of the mentioned factors, can sometimes cause over or undercharging of the encounter’s Room and Bed charge as well as the Observation hours (if the patient was in observation) tied to a patient’s encounter.
If you are not confident that your organization is capturing 100 percent of your expected Room and Bed charges or the appropriate amount of observation hours for your patients due to the lack of reporting; Panther can help. Softek created a Potential Missing Room and Bed Charges Report within our Charge Capture suite that gives Oracle (Cerner) Millennium clients the ability to identify potential missing room/bed charges, incorrect observation charges and accounts with potential overcharges that require review. This report can provide clients the opportunity to capture and correct charges before the claims are processed to avoid any late charges or penalties.
What does Softek® do?
Softek’s mission is to help hospital systems maximize their investment in Oracle (Cerner) Millennium®. We do this by providing innovative software solutions and consulting services that can achieve more together than either can alone.
At Softek, our team of innovators and software developers brings expertise beyond the ordinary to every client. Our experts are involved with Oracle (Cerner) Millennium® hospitals throughout the country, consulting clients so they can optimize system performance and revenue integrity.
Softek delivers a full suite of consulting services and software solutions to assess and optimize EMR system performance, including revenue cycle integrity and patient accounting.
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