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An outdated charge description master quietly costs you revenue on every encounter it touches. We find where your CDM is out of date or inconsistent and help you fix it, so your charges reflect the care you deliver.
Your Chargemaster is Either Making You Money or Costing You Money. Which is it?
Every service your facility provides flows through your chargemaster. Chargemaster errors accumulate quietly. A procedure code that was retired two years ago and never updated. A revenue code that no longer maps correctly to your payer contracts. A supply charge that has not been reviewed since before the last CMS update. Repeated across every encounter that uses those lines, small errors add up.
The regulatory stakes are equally real. The Hospital Price Transparency rule requires hospitals to publish a machine-readable file of their standard charges and to show prices for shoppable services in a consumer-friendly way. CMS can impose civil monetary penalties for each day a hospital is out of compliance (45 CFR 180.90). An unreviewed CDM is a compliance liability as well as a revenue problem.
Our AAPC/CPC Certified Coders and Billers review your CDM against current code sets, billing rules and your payer contracts, and help you correct what's out of date.
A CDM isn't a document you set up once. Codes change every year, payer contracts change, and new services get added. Without regular review and maintenance, errors build up.
Our CDM management for hospitals is built on this discipline. We do not deliver a one-time fix and walk away. We set up a review and maintenance schedule with you, so your chargemaster keeps up with code updates, payer changes and new services.
Line-by-Line Chargemaster Audit. We start with a line-by-line review of your charge description master against the current CPT and HCPCS code sets, the revenue codes on the UB-04 (maintained by the National Uniform Billing Committee), Medicare billing rules and your active payer contracts, identifying discrepancies, outdated codes, missing charges, and pricing anomalies that are costing your facility money. The review looks for four common kinds of CDM problems:
Codes that weren't updated after the annual code set changes, which lead to claim edits, rejections and payment delays.
Where the assigned revenue code does not align with the current service description, causing claim errors that may not surface until a payer review.
Where charges haven't kept pace with costs or payer allowables. When a contract pays a percentage of charges, an underpriced line means lower payment.
Where services are being delivered but no corresponding CDM entry exists, meaning those services generate zero revenue regardless of how many times they are provided.
You get a written findings report with prioritized fixes and an estimate of their revenue impact.
This covers revenue code alignment, CPT and HCPCS code checks and consistent service descriptions. We also review your CDM for bundling and unbundling risks, so related charges are grouped correctly and separately billable services aren't folded into a bundle. The result is a cleaner chargemaster that's easier to defend.
The AMA releases CPT updates each year, effective January 1. CMS updates HCPCS Level II codes quarterly, and the NUBC changes revenue codes from time to time. Each cycle introduces new, deleted, or revised codes that can create errors in an unmonitored CDM. MedixCode provides structured annual code set updates, reviewing your chargemaster, replacing retired codes, adding new services, and flagging areas requiring clinical or administrative review. We also keep your chargemaster current between annual updates, on a schedule agreed with you.
Under 45 CFR 180.90, the maximum daily penalty is $300 for hospitals with 30 or fewer beds, $10 per bed for hospitals with 31 to 550 beds, and $5,500 for hospitals with more than 550 beds (before annual inflation adjustments). For the largest hospitals that's more than $2 million a year. We map your CDM data to the CMS file format, check that the required data elements are present and correctly structured, and support your shoppable services display. Since January 1, 2026, the file must also carry an attestation naming a senior official and, for percentage- or algorithm-based negotiated charges, the 10th percentile, median and 90th percentile allowed amounts (CMS CY 2026 OPPS final rule, CMS-1834-FC, released November 21, 2025; enforced from April 1, 2026).
When your facility launches a new clinical service line, that service needs to be correctly represented in your chargemaster before the first charge goes out. We work with your clinical, operational and revenue cycle staff to list the billable services, assign CPT, HCPCS and revenue codes, set charge amounts and build the CDM lines before the service line opens.
Four reasons to consider MedixCode for CDM review and maintenance.
Our AAPC/CPC Certified Coders and Billers understand how CDM lines turn into claims. We can tell a CDM problem from a workflow problem, and we address both.
We review your CDM against your actual payer contracts, to find where charge amounts are out of line with what contracts pay.
CMS price transparency requirements, annual code updates and OIG compliance guidance change every year. We follow those changes and apply them to your CDM work.
Each review ends with prioritized recommendations and an estimate of what's at stake, so your leadership can decide what to fix first.
Common chargemaster questions we hear from hospitals and health systems.
Didn't find your question?
Contact usAt least once a year, timed around the January CPT and HCPCS updates, with smaller updates when CMS releases quarterly HCPCS changes or when you add services.
A chargemaster review finds what's wrong with your current CDM: outdated codes, revenue code mismatches, missing charges and pricing problems. The cleanup fixes them: correcting codes, aligning revenue codes and restructuring lines to support correct payment.
The machine-readable standard charges file and the consumer-facing shoppable services display both draw from CDM data. If your chargemaster is incomplete, inconsistently coded, or formatted incorrectly, your transparency file will reflect those problems, and CMS can find them during a compliance review.
When your CDM is current and its codes and charges are documented, it's easier to show how each charge line was coded and priced if a payer questions it.
We start by learning your facility's service lines, payer mix and current CDM structure. Then we review the CDM line by line against current code sets and payer requirements, and give you a written findings report with prioritized fixes.
Yes. We review each facility's CDM and flag where lines for the same service differ between facilities, so you can decide where they should match. We work inside your existing systems, and you keep ownership of your data.
CDM problems stay hidden until a payer review or a revenue shortfall brings them out. Book a free consultation. Tell us about your facility, service lines and when your CDM was last reviewed, and we'll talk through where we'd start.
Questions about your CDM? Email info@medixcode.com or use our contact page.