Improving Hospital Wide Charging Process

System integration between the Electronic Medical Record System (EMR) and the billing system (SAP) allow charges to be billed automatically when procedures, tests, purchases are ordered or done. This allows clinical stuff to save time from administrative work dealing with the billing of medical charges. However due to the integration being a new implementation, and due to process variations, an increasing trend of billing error was brought to the attention of the hospital's senior management. A Billing Transformation Team sponsored by our Group Chief Finance Officer was formed in August 2016 to investigate and reduce these billing errors.

Though monthly analysis of EMR and SAP data, our team was able to churn a monthly status reports to show the trends of erroneous charges, and associate them to different areas of the hospital. We would then deep dive the areas with the highest number of errors, and get the users, IT and Medical Informatics team together to solve each issue.

Some problems were solved at the system level with minor improvements to the user interface, some required more through study and redesign of processes on the ground to reduce the opportunities at which error in charging could be committed. Within a span of 6 months we have reduced the total number of failed charges by approximately 47.5%.

Though merging of Warehouse Management System (WMS) and SAP data, we have also managed uncover other poor charging practices currently not reflected in our error reports. These errors are predominately due to mis-charging practices committed by staff. These figures would form the target of subsequent projects to come.

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