• Dr. D. Shreedevi

Billing process is the final step in hospital, which is directly proportional to patient satisfaction. Billing plays a vital role in the discharge process and billing documents are even legally important. The hospital billing process is mainly to ensure remuneration for the services and materials provided by hospital to patients. The objective of the study is to evaluate the functioning of billing department in a tertiary care hospital as it plays an important role, as liaison office between the management and the patients. An observational and descriptive study was conducted by using flow chart, bar charts and root-cause analysis for analysing and understanding the billing process in detail and to identify the factors influencing delay in process of billing for insurance patients’ and cash patients. Lean principles were applied to the process and various elements of possible waste were identified.The study is based on random samples of 140 bills. The results show that there is a delay in the preparation of bills and the reasons for delay in submission are due to reporting of investigations, files kept in ward without dispatching, incomplete file, and absence of process monitoring, lack of training, resubmission of documents or bills, shortage of manpower and so on. Some of the ways for optimizing the billing process have been suggested like, increasing the manpower, responsibility and authority matrix, control chart, training and key performance measures for analysing the overall department. The study concludes that it is important for billing personnel to understand and continuously review billing process in detail to have an effective billing process in healthcare organization.

Lean Management, Process, Turnaround Time (TAT), Third Party Administrator (TPA), Value Stream Mapping (VSM)

"LEAN MANAGEMENT IN HOSPITAL BILLING", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 2, page no.17-30, February-2019, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRY006004.pdf

"LEAN MANAGEMENT IN HOSPITAL BILLING", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 2, page no. pp17-30, February-2019, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRY006004.pdf