An Intranet-based system for inpatient billing in an academic medical center.

Academic physicians face great economic challenges. There is therefore a growing need to increase the efficiency of academic practice. One potential target for improving the "business" of medicine is inpatient billing. Currently many academic centers use "yellow" cards for inpatient billing. This is an inefficient system for capturing patient charges. We describe an Intranet-based system for inpatient billing that improves physician "productivity," reduces billing lag time, and increases the collection rate and total revenues.