Strategic Contracting from IRP delivers valuable charge, cost and mark-up information. A Web-based application using the latest Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) data supplied by CMS, it lets you identify how a provider organization’s pricing compares with its peers.

IRP provides multiple data integrity edits, such as removing records with less than one dollar in charges for any given procedure. Measures like these ensure that average cost or charge calculations are not skewed downward due to bad data or missing charges.

We also offer all comparative cost and charge reports with the ability to remove outliers from the mean calculations.

Strategic Contracting features

• Identify how a hospital’s outpatient pricing and frequency compare with its competitors or selected peer groups at the HCPCS level
• Identify how a hospital’s outpatient costs compare
• Determine how a hospital’s current charge mark-up factor compares
• Use this knowledge to negotiate contracts with hospitals
• Monitor pricing and Medicare outpatient activity via the Web and rerun reports as updates are received from CMS

The Strategic Contracting module’s reports compare average or mean charge, cost, and mark-up, per HCPCS code, for any customized peer group selected from a database of more than 5,000 providers. The module also produces reports illustrating the detail for each hospital in the comparative group. Reports also include frequency statistics and hospital names.