Mobile Charge Capture

​Hospitals and healthcare organizations must be able to catalog and appropriately charge for all services that they provide to their patients. Each patient is a customer and it is important that the hospital is able to correctly catalog the disease and then charge the appropriate amount for each such service. In our healthcare system, this is further complicated by the diversity of coding arcana (ICD, CPT etc), government regulations and special cases.
 
Physicians lose revenue every day by failing to capture the charges for all the work that they do. Most physicians either do not log all their work, or are delayed in being able to capture and log all the work and services rendered. Physicians expend time and effort after hours and such charge capture is manual, error prone and eats in to their productivity during the day.
 
Most hospital and medical establishments have a CDM (Charge Master) which is part of their EMR / EHR (electronic health or medical records system) which contains a description of their services, and the appropriate amounts to charge for each such service. But the process of collecting these charges is sometimes fraught with issues. The doctors who meet the patients, diagnose their problems and capture these issues in a “patient encounter” may have a very different interpretation of the problem from what is in the CDM. In most hospitals until the advent of the EMR system, this was a manual process and the doctor had to look up a piece of paper, log the service code on a piece of paper which would then be input to the EMR system by a separate clinical and entry group. Lost revenue from improper or late billing affected the bottom line in every hospital.
 
Mobile Charge Capture attempts to address this issue; mobile real time charge capture software allows doctors to capture services rendered, accurately classify these against the right charge codes and then submit these charges in real time to the billing staff who can then process these charges and submit them for reimbursement. Most doctors have a mobile phone and the MCC (Mobile Charge Capture) application allows them to use their phone or a hospital provided mobile device to capture, validate and submit these charges in real time. Errors are reduced significantly and these applications can be directly integrated in to a hospitals EMR system that allows the sync to happen in near real time.
 
Such MCC (Mobile Charge Capture) provides physicians and healthcare organizations compelling return on investment value by reducing lost charges, increasing revenue and expediting the billing process and payment. It has also been shown to reduce denials of billing due to better accuracy of capture and real time validation. Administrative costs also reduce significantly as most of the process gets automated in real time. Billers don’t have to chase after the physicians and patients to validate charges and codes and this significantly speeds up the processing and collection of revenue.
 
Physicians in today’s healthcare organization also face pressures to maximize their RVU productivity.  They get paid based on their RVUs and the mobile charge capture software allows physicians to maximize their RVU and by association their bonus payouts. So there is added incentive for not only the healthcare organization but also the physician’s community to adopt this software.
 
Our research analyzed key vendors in the MCC market and we believe that while most of the vendors offer similar products, the ease of integration to different EMRs differ. Some offer a more complete set of features and cater to both the needs of the physician network in addition to billing specialists but some focus solely on the physician community. Security is a prerequisite for operating in this market and 2 factor authentication and higher requirements for security dominate this mobile application market. The products also don’t offer the same level of customizability. Automated validation of charges is a feature that varies by product and some vendors offer a more holistic set of AQA functionality.
 

In order to protect our sources and vendors who have shared information with us, we choose not to reveal vendor names here.  The above graph shows 3 sample vendors but we have chosen not to include all the vendors in this study. Contact us for any information pertinent to this growing and nascent healthcare market!