Q&A: Staffing for chargemaster responsibilities

Q: How is your chargemaster staffed?

Kim Yelton, RHIA, CCS, CDIP, CHRI, director of revenue integrity at WakeMed in Raleigh, North Carolina: We have a manager over charge capture and our CDM. She has three charge capture analysts who work with the departments on ensuring charge reconciliation, late charges, and so forth. [She also] has one CDM coordinator who works along with IT to make the updates within the chargemaster.

Frank Cantrell, CHRI, system director of corporate revenue integrity at Penn Highlands Healthcare in DuBois, Pennsylvania: We have three separate chargemasters. I have a chargemaster coordinator for each one of them at the moment. Eventually, that will dwindle down to one. They do review any changes, but those also go through me so that we have consistency across the entire organization. Similarly, [for] the year-end changes, we work with the departments and make sure they’re aware of their changes and what is being deleted or added. We try to keep a close rein on who can physically go in and make changes or updates. My auditors assist if they see problems in the chargemaster when they’re working denials or working with the payer. They [meet] with the coordinator to talk those through and get those resolved.

Alisha Rohrer, CPC, COC, CRCP-I, director of revenue integrity at WellSpan Health in York, Pennsylvania: We have five CDM analysts within revenue integrity. They support eight facilities, so they’re broken out by service lines and support all of those facilities. We have a corporate chargemaster within Epic, and they collectively work with the clinical operations department to establish the charges, establish the data elements of the coding aspect, and then we proceed to send that information to revenue analytics. This is a separate department within our facility that handles all of the pricing: the annual price adjustments and things of that nature.

Editor's note: This Q&A was excerpted from the 2021 State of the Revenue Integrity Industry Survey Report. See the full report to learn more about chargemaster staffing and maintenance practices across the revenue integrity industry.