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Best practice
Following are examples we have observed among our best performing hospitals in managing the lifecycle of Chargemaster Toolkit and their hospital CDM.
- Perform your first Merge within the first month after you install Chargemaster Toolkit. This will assure you quickly identify process issues that could cause your CDM to be inaccurate. It will also reduce the number of implementation errors you need to manage while you are still learning the process. Employees are less likely to trust and use the Toolkit if they see it does not accurately reflect the current values in the live CDM.
- The Merge process is only covered briefly during the initial on-site installation and training event. We want users to get familiar with the basic navigation, audit and documentation features first. Be sure to sign up for a class on the Merge process in Craneware’s Training Events Center when you are ready to perform you first Merge. Or contract Training@craneware.com if you need further coaching or assistance in understanding your implementation errors.
- Customizing your Implementation Errors avoids dealing with discrepancies in data fields that only exist within your Toolkit data file, and therefore are typically represented by blank fields in your CDM extract file.
- Best practice hospitals recognize that Chargemaster Toolkit is much more than an analytical or audit tool. For them the Toolkit has become the workbench through which all CDM maintenance is initiated, analyzed, documented and monitored. To avoid redundancy of data entry to the live CDM and its inherent risk of human error they use Interface Scripting to insure all edits in the Toolkit are accurately applied to the Live CDM. This eliminates the majority if not all risk of Merge Implementation errors.
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