A chargemaster, also known as a charge description master (CDM), is a hospital’s collection of all items that the hospital can bill to any payers, patients, or facilities, such as insurance companies. The chargemaster is usually organized by departments, and each department is given a numeric code. According to Iris Stone’s article “The Chargemaster: What’s Really Behind Those Hospital Bills,” hospitals do not have uniform guidelines for setting and changing prices on the items on the chargemaster, so each hospital’s administration makes any decisions regarding the chargemaster. The prices on a hospital’s chargemaster may be varied due to several different details, such as costs of new technologies and other hospital-specific operational costs. Chargemasters should be updated at least on a quarterly basis, but may be updated more periodically in accordance with CMS guideline or other events.
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Tompkins, Stuart H. Altman, and Efrat Eilat’s article “ The Precarious Pricing System For Hospital Services,” billable charges are often inflated because many insurance companies have a common practice of negotiating with the hospitals to pay only as much as the lowest-paying
Tompkins, Stuart H. Altman, and Efrat Eilat’s article “ The Precarious Pricing System For Hospital Services,” billable charges are often inflated because many insurance companies have a common practice of negotiating with the hospitals to pay only as much as the lowest-paying