As a mom of three, I recently had to trade in my Prius for a minivan. That story is for a whole other blog! But as part of the van-buying experience, I got new plates.

Lo and behold, I received plates that actually were meaningful to me! UCL 121.

As an ex-Epic revenue cycle veteran, I can never look at the combination of these three letters, UCL, without thinking of hours spent analyzing charges, charge triggering and interfaces.  For those non-Epic readers, UCL stands for Universal Charge Line.  Epic organizes its records into groups called masterfiles.  Each masterfile has three letters that, for the most part, stand for something.  The Professional Billing and Hospital Billing applications have a couple of masterfiles you are constantly using and looking up.

Based on how often I used the following masterfiles in my billing days, I would have been equally as happy with my license plate if it would have been:

• TAR: Temporary AR in Professional Billing
• ETR: Enterprise Transaction Record in Professional Billing
• WQF: Workqueue Record in both Professional and Hospital Billing
• HTR: Hospital Transaction Record in Hospital Billing
• CER: Rules master files used in workqueue records to capture or exclude records

Each record references an INI as well as an item.  The item ID tells you more specific meta data about the record.  Just for fun, I also had to look up what UCL 121 actually was on the Universal Charge Line record.

UCL 121 = ORDER_ID

I couldn’t have been happier that my new minivan license plate represents the order that triggered the charge.  Looking at it metaphorically, my van is the instigator and cause of future charges.  Which translates well into my monthly loan payment. Let’s hope it doesn’t result in any more additional charges because I follow the CER of the road!