Are you looking for an efficient way to manage reporting in your organization? Are you aware that Epic has functionality that can be used to roll up your revenue in ways that are an addition to your organization’s facility structure? To supplement your reporting by provider, department, revenue location or place of service you can implement the use of bill areas. The bill area hierarchy will allow you to group items together to report by service line, a particular provider group, or another predefined method that is important to your organization. The use of bill areas can also be a useful tool to use for workqueue distribution in your charge review, claims and follow up processes.
The Bill Area Hierarchy
The bill area hierarchy includes three levels:
- Bill areas. The most specific level – used to identify subspecialties or a type of service that would be valuable to review separately.
- Financial subdivision. Used to group several bill areas together to report under one manager or director in a large service line.
- Financial Division. Used to group all financial subdivisions together to report as one service line.
Once you have implemented bill areas, creating reports using the fields will give you another way to review information. For example, you could report on any one of the fields listed below.
Bill Area Financial Subdivision Financial Division
Sleep Lab Pulmonary Medicine Service Line
Breathing Disorders Pulmonary Medicine Service Line
Pulmonologist Pulmonary Medicine Service Line
Dieticians Endocrine Medicine Service Line
Endocrinologist Endocrine Medicine Service Line
Dialysis Services Nephrology Medicine Service Line
Clearly define each level and communicate the definition and purpose of bill area, financial subdivision and financial division to operational leaders. Your Finance and IT departments will need to help maintain the integrity of your bill area hierarchy structure as you continue to grow.
Implementing Bill Area Changes
When you come to an agreement on what to build, add the bill areas to provider and department records. While this may seem to be an overwhelming task, the outcome will be well worth the effort. Once you have built the bill area hierarchy, you cannot update the Financial Subdivisions or Financial Divisions. If you want to change those fields, you will need to build new bill areas and update the provider and department records accordingly.
There are system settings that will need to be configured to determine how the bill area will be assigned to a charge, and whether it is based on the service provider or the billing provider. Once the setting is in place, each charge will have a bill area that can be used for multiple purposes. When you add a bill area to a department, the provider record will need to have the same bill area in their provider record and if there is one match, the bill area will default in. This allows a provider to work in multiple specialties and have different bill areas assigned depending on the department where they saw the patient.
Want to learn more? The Wilshire Group has experienced staff that can work with you to understand your current needs and put together a project plan to implement the use of bill areas. Please Contact Us if you would like to learn more.
