It is never one price
Ask a clinic what a consultation costs and you get a number. Ask again with cases: a follow-up within fifteen days, a second opinion, a review after a procedure, a staff member’s family, a camp patient, a corporate panel. The single number becomes a dozen, and most of them live in somebody’s head.
That is the actual work of a fee schedule. Not typing prices, but discovering the rules that were never written down and deciding which ones survive.
Two dimensions get you most of the way
In practice, hospital pricing turns on what is being done and the circumstances it is being done in. Which service, and which visit context. Model those two properly and the majority of real exceptions are expressible without a special case.
The failure mode is a system that models only the first, and then every contextual rule becomes a manual discount at the counter, which is how a clinic ends up unable to explain its own revenue.
Discounts are a different problem
A discount is not a price. It is a decision someone made, and the useful question is who is allowed to make it and whether anybody reviews it afterwards.
Systems that treat discounts as an editable price field lose that distinction, and the hospital loses the ability to answer why revenue moved. Approval controls exist for this reason, and their absence is worth asking about, including in our case, where they are scheduled rather than built.
How to make it go faster
Start before the software arrives. The exercise is independent of any vendor: list your services, list the contexts in which the price differs, and get one person to decide the ones nobody can agree on.
Then resist the urge to model every historical exception. Some of them are not policies, they are one decision somebody made in 2019 that has been repeated ever since. An implementation is a reasonable moment to stop repeating it.