Stratified random sampling for estimating billing accuracy in health care systems

This paper presents a stratified random sampling plan for estimating accuracy of bill processing performance for the health care bills submitted to third party payers in health care systems. Bill processing accuracy is estimated with two measures: percent accuracy and total dollar accuracy. Difficulties in constructing a sampling plan arise when the population strata structure is unknown, and when the two measures require different sampling schemes. To efficiently utilize sample resource, the sampling plan is designed to effectively estimate both measures from the same sample.