ORLANDO, FL – Craneware, Inc. has announced the release of a new software application designed to help hospitals capture lost reimbursements for medications.
Pharmacy ChargeLink is designed to establish a connection between a hospital’s pharmaceutical purchase history and its charge description master (CDM), ensuring pricing and coding accuracy and allowing hospitals to optimize reimbursements for faculty-administered medications.
“Constantly changing formularies, prices and reimbursement policies make it difficult for hospitals to maintain current and complete information about their pharmacy supply costs. As a result, organizations often miss reimbursement opportunities and lose revenue,” said Craneware president Jim Wilson. “By using Pharmacy ChargeLink, hospitals … will be able to strengthen their financial performance and maintain control over their pharmacy pricing.”
“The application will also help them support defensible pricing and provide a systematic way to guide their pricing strategies and policies – a must for successful revenue cycle management,” he added.
According to the American Hospital Association, uncompensated healthcare costs reached an all-time high of more than $31.2 billion for registered community hospitals in the United States in 2006, accounting for 5.7 percent of total expenses.
Pharmacy ChargeLink allows for continuous monitoring of pharmaceutical operations from point of purchase to reimbursement, and can identify items out of alignment with a hospital’s pricing guidelines. In addition, the application is linked to the Thomson Red Book database, a source of information for pricing data on prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications, thus allowing users to perform alternative-drug searches, benchmark against average wholesale prices and create spending analyses and summaries.
The application was beta tested at University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas.
“Previously, we could only identify pharmacy charges that were underpaid – we could not find those that were missing CPT codes without exhausting our resources or seeking outside help,” said James Williams, the hospital’s CDM specialist, in a press release. “Pharmacy ChargeLink provides us with a way to improve and optimize charge capture in the pharmacy department. In fact, within the first few hours of using the application, we identified $86,000 in missed pharmacy-related reimbursement opportunities.”