Chargemaster
listing of items billable to a patient being treated at a hospital in the United States
In the United States, the chargemaster, also known as charge master, or charge description master (CDM), is a comprehensive listing of items billable to a hospital patient or a patient's health insurance provider. In practice, it usually contains highly inflated prices at several times that of actual costs to the hospital. The chargemaster typically serves as the starting point for negotiations with patients and health insurance providers of what amount of money will actually be paid to the hospital. It is described as "the central mechanism of the revenue cycle" of a hospital.
Description
The chargemaster may be alternatively referred to as the "charge master", "hospital chargemaster", or the "charge description master" (CDM). It is a comprehensive listing of items billable to a hospital patient or a patient's health insurance provider. It is described as "the central mechanism of the revenue cycle" of a hospital. Chargemasters include thousands of hospital services, medical procedures, equipment fees, drugs, supplies, and diagnostic evaluations such as imaging and blood tests. Each item in the chargemaster is assigned a unique identifier code and a set price that are used to generate patient bills. Every hospital system maintains its own chargemaster.
The public source identifies “Chargemaster” as listing of items billable to a patient being treated at a hospital in the United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chargemaster, listing and items.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chargemaster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.