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Our Managing Director of Reimbursement Services received a call from a hospital client requesting a Charge Description Master (CDM) Assessment. This client recently created a new position within their organization and hired a CDM Coordinator to maintain the CDM. After meeting in detail with this fairly new employee, we discovered that not only had the organization not conducted a chargemaster review in the past several years, but there were no policies and procedures, no compliance plan, and no CDM maintenance manual created to ensure their ability to sustain any recommended changes. Upon learning of these hospital deficiencies, we broadened the scope of our service offerings to include not only a CDM Assessment, but also the development of a CDM Maintenance Manual that will incorporate all of the necessary elements to ensure sustainability on a go-forward basis.
As is true with most projects, receiving C-suite buy-in is critical to the success of the outcome. Therefore, we scheduled a meeting to include hospital administration and all other hospital stakeholders to initiate the process of change management among the staff with the support of leadership. This initial meeting was vital to demonstrate the importance of the overall project to the hospital staff and gave our work the credibility it deserved.
Following our detailed CDM work and interviews with the various Department Directors, we prepared a line-by-line assessment and offered an implementation tool which illustrated recommended additions, deactivations and variance to their existing chargemaster. In addition, during this time, we were also working to create applicable policies and procedures surrounding functions such as additions/deactivations to the CDM, sign off criteria, pricing procedures with standardized mark up formulas, as well as, several job descriptions for future new positions for a CDM Team. The project proved to be successful primarily because Sinaiko had the expertise to know establishing C-suite buy-in coupled with the development of maintenance procedures would lead to sustainable results. |
