Investigating the Rate and Causes of Hospital Deductions and Determining its Reduction Strategies in Iranian Hospitals

Hospital deductions are predominantly costs that are spent by the hospital, but are not funded and reimbursed. The deductions are 10-30% of the hospital income, of which more than 20% of these deductions are applied to the documents through the hospitals themselves. The purposes of this research is to examining the deductions imposed by insurance organization and hospitals, as well as identifies the causes of these deductions and provide practical solutions for reducing deductions.

The present study is a descriptive-analytic study that was done retrospectively and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The statistical population consisted of a set of hospitals providing health services in the country. The sampled hospitals were 14 units. The number of medical records in order to examine the insurance deductions, using the Cochran method, was estimated at 1715 cases. Data analysis was performed using descriptive and analytical methods in accordance with each of the levels of subtraction. At each end of the analysis, the amount of deduction was extracted from each case.

on average (geometric mean), there is a 87% probability of not registering at least one service in a medical record. The highest financial burden due to the lack of registration of the service at HIS occurs in private hospitals at a rate of 558241 Rials per case. There was a significant correlation between the type of hospital and the set of factors examined about the causes of the deficit in the audit by the hospital income experts (P <0.001). Anesthesiology/ Consultant (15.27%) is the most common cause of the deduction by the insurance companies. The average cost of a deduction applied to a medical record in is 3,873,723 Rials, which accounts for 5.5% of the total cost of each medical record.

Analysis of the findings shows that a high cost of hospital-provided services for patients is not reimbursed to the hospital. This challenge depends on many factors, in which not only insurance organizations, but also hospitals and service providers, who are in charge of the service record and financial statements regulators, are affected.