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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 longterm file management. In this article, we discuss the critical role charge descriptions play in maintaining a healthy masterfile, as well as best practices teams should incorporate to facilitate effective ongoing charge description management.
What Is a Charge Description? Charge descriptions are key data elements in the charging file of a hospital, clinic, or physician billing system. The charge description is a limited character field that represents the item or service that is being charged by the healthcare provider. Differing hospital information system vendors have varying field length limits, but all try to accommodate the electronic hospital and professional fee (“UB” and “1500” claims requirements). Charge descriptions flow to detailed patient account encounter-specific charges that may be provided upon request to the patient or simply archived in your system for charge detail backup.
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About Panacea Healthcare Solutions Panacea provides software and tech-enabled services that help healthcare organizations improve their revenue cycle, coding, and compliance with front-line expertise in mid-revenue cycle management. In an era where 95% of provider revenue is driven by accurate coding and defensible yet optimal pricing, clients trust Panacea to deliver unparalleled value in strategic pricing, price transparency, chargemaster, compliance, and revenue cycle solutions.
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