Discharged Not Final Billed (DNFB)
Discharged Not Final Billed (DNFB) is a revenue-cycle metric capturing accounts where the patient has been discharged or completed service but the claim has not yet been billed. High DNFB delays ASC cash flow and signals coding or documentation bottlenecks.
What is Discharged Not Final Billed (DNFB)?
Discharged Not Final Billed (DNFB) is a revenue-cycle metric that captures accounts where the patient has finished their care or been discharged, but the claim has not yet been dropped to the payer. These accounts represent completed work that has not yet entered the billing pipeline.
DNFB is usually expressed as a dollar value or as days of revenue held up before billing. A persistently high number indicates that finished cases are stalling somewhere between the end of service and claim submission.
Why does DNFB matter for cash flow?
Revenue that is stuck in DNFB cannot be collected, so a swollen backlog directly delays the arrival of cash even when the underlying care has already been delivered. The longer accounts sit unbilled, the more working capital the center ties up unnecessarily.
For ambulatory surgery centers, elevated DNFB usually traces back to coding queues, missing documentation, or operative reports that have not been finalized. Watching the metric helps managers pinpoint and clear the specific bottlenecks slowing the path to a billed claim.
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