Mitch's Blog

For two decades I’ve worked with hospitals and their revenue cycle issues as an independent consultant. Before that I worked as an employee in hospitals, physician billing companies and a FQHC. I’ve been in health care almost 40 years (man, I’m old!). Yeah, that’s me! The people I talk to (or try to talk with) […]

Years ago I wrote an article titled Why Hospital CFOs Don’t Hire CDM Consultants. I wrote it because I’ve seen and read about a lot of bad advice that’s been given to facilities and companies that hurt them way more than helped. Being an independent consultant, I couldn’t let something like that keep occurring without […]

I’ve written about hospital charge masters in many of my articles on health care. I wrote a one paragraph explanation about charge masters years ago, but it’s not close to being sufficient. This particular article on charge masters is actually a repurposed article that I wrote back in 2011, but search engines don’t include older […]

I sometimes wonder if people think that I’m hard on hospital leadership. I want to stress that there’s nothing further from the truth. The reason I talk about it from time to time as being somewhat different than almost anything else is because health care is a different animal than any other business. Whereas most […]

Most of what is done in patient accounting (aka patient financial services) is fairly simple and routine. The days of only paper claims are gone (but not totally eliminated). These days, if registration has done its job, and the departments have done their jobs, and your charge master is up to date, most of the […]