Common billing issues in hospitals

Whenever manual processes are involved, the billing error has been observed commonly. While most of them are unintentional, some of them are cleverly planned.

Lets see what are the common billing issues which are really frustrating:

1. Duplicates billing for the same service, supplies or medications
2. Charges for services which were never rendered to you or number of rendered unit is wrong
3. Charges for canceled services
4. Number of days in hospital also counting the discharge day
5. Incorrect room charges, specially when people changes rooms (for example from semi-private to private)
6. Bill for more time than you actually used a service, for example oxygen cylinder
7. Keystroke error can also result in an incorrect charge for a service
8. Incorrect unit of measure (Eaches, Grams and Milliliters) and thus cost

While some of the issues are unintentional, it is the intentional errors like calculating discharge day or including the canceled services, which really hurts the patients. Hospital must understand that patient is looking for complete transparency. Patient trusts that the hospital will provide them the most accurate bills.

However, due to human error or system error, we usually end of seeing these common error. While automation tries to reduce common human errors, the hospital must ensure that the automated solution really works before they start billing the customers. Also, if software can have some inbuilt verification to cross-check and confirm any keystroke mistakes then a lot of time and energy can be saved.