Assignment Objectives:  Participate in the development of processes and selection of the applications for charge master and claims management. Purpose:  Students will become familiar with how a chargemaster is used in a healthcare facility to include how it is set up and maintained.
Assignment Description:  You are an assistant director in a health information management department.  You have been given the responsibility of maintaining the chargemaster.  The person who was maintaining the chargemaster just quit, and to save money, administration has decided to add this to your current duties instead of filling the position.  You only spent a day with the person who resigned to learn about what you need to do.  This is what you learned:

• The chargemaster coordinator did 100% of the maintenance on the chargemaster
• If she had a question, she would call and ask the appropriate department
• She was about 3 months behind in her maintenance
• When departments stared new services, she usually learned about them a week after they started, when billing problems arose
• The reason she quit was because she was so frustrated with her job

You are concerned about what you have learned.  You know you cannot do this alone, especially with your other duties.  You drag out your textbooks, surf the Internet, and order a new book on chargemaster maintenance.  After studying up on the subject, you decide to draft a proposal on a better way to manage the chargemaster.  You want to do a good job because the director has agreed to send the final report to administration.

Parameters:  Come up with a plan to fix the overall process of chargemaster maintenance.  The plan should identify ways to correct the issues you learned about during your day of education.  Your plan should be in the form of a memo addressed to hospital administration.  Also include in the plan how denied claims due to chargemaster errors will be worked and who the responsible departments will be.