Q&A: Assigning responsibility for charge entry

Q: If a clinical department does not enter their own charges, what staff member holds that responsibility?
Tracy Cahoon, MBA, CHRI, director of revenue integrity at Southwest General Health Center in Middleburg Heights, Ohio: I have an observation charge capture specialist that reports to me. She is responsible for reviewing of all of our Medicare and Medicaid and managed care observation cases for accurate reporting of observation hours, which includes backing out the active monitoring time for the Medicare cases. The ED is charged out by our HIM department. Room and board automatically charges based on accommodation code and patient type. We have a charge capture specialist who does the manual charging for our cath lab and our interventional radiology as well.
Crystal Tobin, COC, CHRI, ROCC, revenue integrity service line specialist/subject matter expert at Sutter Health in Sacramento, California: We have a team that does 100% review for observation hours for all of our patients. We have an ED charging team as well and they enter the ED charges. Room and board, the charge is automatically populated. For cardiac cath lab and interventional radiology, the departments are actually responsible for entering those charges but we do have a specialized coder who does 100% review of those to ensure that those are being sent out appropriately.

Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from the 2023 State of the Revenue Integrity Industry Survey Report. Read the full report here.