Q&A: Entering charges

Q: What charges at your organization are not entered by clinical staff?

Lori Braschler, CCS, CHRI, revenue integrity coding auditor at CommonSpirit Health in Bakersfield, California: Our revenue integrity department does the observation and emergency department charging. So we’re the ones that do the drug administration charges when we do the other charges.

Karen Kennedy, director of revenue integrity at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio: [For each organization] it’s going to depend on what [they have] set up in the EHRs: what can drop from documentation, what is going to explode from something else, whether or not it actually has to be entered by anyone, be that clinical staff or somebody else. Drug administration codes are really hard. As revenue integrity, we have to constantly try to educate to have them used correctly. But honestly, it comes down to having a lot of rules built on the back side to catch things that aren’t appropriate and correct them before they go out.

Tina Rosier, MS, PT, director of revenue integrity acute care services Community Health Network in Indianapolis, Indiana: Over the last two to three years, we’ve been urged more than usual to automate as much charging as possible. We’ve also found that as we automate, we tend to get less accurate and have more problems. [I]t’s a balance between what we automate, what we let clinical charge, and what we charge through the revenue integrity side.

Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from the 2022 State of the Revenue Integrity Industry Survey Report. Read the full report here.