If your Charge Description Master (chargemaster) is not up-to-date, then you’re not accurately reflecting to the payer world what you’re doing clinically. It’s challenging to keep the chargemaster accurate because the rules are continually changing: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) make quarterly changes to the rule sets, hospital clinical departments make changes throughout the year, and third party payers sometimes come up with their own rule sets for different service areas that they want to track and bill differently than Medicare. It’s very difficult to keep up with all of those changes.