How to Automate Craneware

The chargemaster is the price list every hospital bill comes from

Craneware, which now trades as The Craneware Group, sells revenue integrity and 340B software to US hospitals and health systems. Its products sit on a platform called Trisus, and the one most people mean when they say Craneware is Trisus Chargemaster.

The chargemaster, or CDM, lists every billable item and service in the hospital with the code and price attached to each. A bag of saline, an hour in an operating room, a scan, a drug, a room night. If a line on that file is wrong, every bill carrying it is wrong too, and the error repeats quietly until somebody notices.

So the people who touch it are careful. A revenue integrity team owns the file, coders and HIM staff answer for what the codes mean, department managers submit what they want added, and pharmacy has its own tangle of drug codes and units. The CDM is where all of them meet, and the closest thing a hospital has to a single statement of what it charges for.

Code changes arrive four times a year and land on one team

The codes underneath that file do not sit still. Quarterly HCPCS updates, the annual CPT changes, edits to national and local coverage, revised fee schedules from Medicare and every state Medicaid programme. All of it published, all of it somebody's job to read.

That reading is done by hand. An analyst opens a payer's provider portal, finds the medical policy section, and works out whether this month's bulletin touches anything the hospital actually bills. Someone else downloads a state fee schedule and compares it against the last one to see which lines moved.

Meanwhile the department that started using a new supply three weeks ago never told anyone, so the charge is missing and nobody will find it until the month end reconciliation. None of this is hard. It is only endless, and it lands on a team small enough to know each other's names.

Craneware

The bulletin round Each payer's medical policy page and the MAC's coverage articles read on the week they post, with anything naming a code you bill pulled out.

Fee schedules as they change Published Medicare and state Medicaid files watched for new quarterly versions, so nobody finds out from a remittance six weeks later.

Denial detail in one worklist Reason codes and underpaid lines collected out of the payer portals they sit in, assembled for a person who can work them.

Trisus Chargemaster reads the CDM against the code sets

This is exactly the work Craneware was built for, and it does it well. Trisus Chargemaster applies logic to the file rather than leaving it as a spreadsheet: it highlights invalid and replaced codes, suggests valid replacements, identifies missing linked codes and billable codes that ought to be there, and keeps an audit trail of who changed what.

Around it sit modules for narrower jobs. The Fee Schedule Module is used to find potential missing revenue in the chargemaster. The Device Back Billing Module examines the CDM for charges with potential eligibility for device back billing. Trisus Pricing Analyzer and Transparency handles the pricing and disclosure side.

What all of it works on is the hospital's own file, checked against reference content Craneware maintains. That is an advantage and also the boundary. The product does not go and open your payer's provider portal to see this month's policy bulletin. It does not sit on the state Medicaid page waiting for the next quarterly file. It does not read the remittance detail that explains why a line was underpaid. Somebody logs in for each of those and carries what they found back to the team.

The payer's own bulletins can be read the week they post

That reading is a task, not a judgement, and tasks can be handed over.

Each payer's medical policy page can be checked the week it updates, with anything naming a code your hospital actually bills pulled out and put in front of the analyst who would have gone looking. The MAC's coverage articles the same. A state Medicaid fee schedule that quietly publishes a new version in March is a page somebody can watch every day without getting bored of it.

The pattern repeats wherever the answer is on a screen behind a login. Denial reason codes gathered out of three payer portals into one worklist, sorted by what they are worth. Underpaid lines listed against the contract terms already on file. Your own posted price transparency file checked against what you believe you published.

Every one of those is gathering. Nothing there decides anything. The value is that the analyst starts the morning with the reading already done, on the day it mattered rather than the week somebody had time.

Every change to the CDM still waits for an analyst

Reading a portal is not the same as changing a charge, and the line between them is the whole point.

WebRun is an AI agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the payer portal, reads what is on the page, and brings it back into a worklist or a sheet. It does not edit a charge code, set a price, submit or adjust a claim, or send anything to a patient. Those are decisions with a person's credential attached, and they stay that way.

It runs on your schedule in your own environment, under a policy on which sites it may open. You can watch a run and stop it part way, and anything irreversible drafts and waits.

The workflows below are already built. Each names the sites it opens and what it collects.