The Basics of Managing Accounts Payable for Healthcare Facilities

Our team of professionals understands the unique financial challenges and regulatory standards that healthcare organizations face, ensuring that your AP processes are accurate and compliant. Today’s healthcare organizations face many challenges as they strive to provide greater value to patients while reducing costs. Your accounts payable system doesn’t have to be part of the struggle when you embrace AP automation. Today’s technology offers a vast array of solutions to help organizations manage accounts payable. But a healthcare-focused accounts payable system, specifically designed to meet the unique needs and challenges of healthcare organizations, can provide the flexibility, security, and efficiency you need. Inefficient AP processes, including the use of paper checks, can also put your organization at greater risk of fraud – something most healthcare organizations strive to avoid at all costs.

• A/R, or accounts receivable in healthcare, is one of the many metrics that need constant monitoring to avoid flushing your rightful payments down the drain.
• Unnecessary write-offs will be reported as financial losses for the facility, leading to bad debts.
• Charity is the liaison between the Remitra sales team and the implementation and operations teams, providing subject matter expertise and ensuring providers’ smooth transition to the Remitra AP automation platform.
• Outsourcing accounts payable services helps healthcare companies achieve cost savings by enhancing productivity, reducing errors, and optimizing accounts payable management.
• Regular security audits and SOC 2 compliance give you confidence that your vendor follows industry best practices.
• Legal liabilities arising from allegations of negligence, errors, or omissions in patient care that result in harm or injury.

The Future of Healthcare Financial Operations

• Companies enjoy lower overall processing costs, immediate approval of invoices, and happier suppliers.
• Rolling out AP automation in healthcare requires a solution built for your sector’s complexity.
• One effective method for overcoming paper’s disadvantages is to transition to automated payable processes.
• Payments can be scheduled and prioritized based on vendor terms and organizational cash flow needs.
• The chances of fraudulent activity also go up because checks can be easily intercepted, rerouted, and duplicated.

The total number of invoices your healthcare business processes can show the current volume of business done and identify growth or recession. Healthcare providers can save nearly $9.8 billion annually by verifying patient eligibility and benefits before suggesting estimated medical costs. Thus, it is recommended that you integrate your electronic health records (EHR) system with a real-time eligibility (RTE) tool to ensure eligibility verification before an encounter. Besides, developing a weekly batch-checking process can also speed up your entire billing workflow. However, if you unnecessarily write off payments, that you can recover through effective A/R management, you will strain your practice’s revenue cycle.

Patient Refund Services

Your team can schedule payments to hit vendor accounts on the best possible date for cash flow and track payment status without calling the vendor. Cash flow, credit ratings, and supplier relationships are all crucial facets of a successful healthcare business. Organizations in the healthcare industry cannot afford to miss payment windows.

Meet healthcare strategy goals with electronic patient refunds

Our healthcare industry experts understand the nuances of your business and stand beside you to help your financial operations run smoothly. No matter where you are on your journey toward digitizing the revenue cycle, contact a knowledgeable banker to learn about helpful tools that can enable you to accelerate the process. Bank Treasury Payment Solutions, serves a large healthcare provider that sends about 300,000 statements (bills) to patients each month. Only about 8,000, or less than 3%, result in the need for a patient refund, for reasons ranging from overpayment to billing adjustments to coding errors, he says.

Despite the Debt to Asset Ratio benefits of automated systems, some healthcare organizations continue to resist changing their existing accounts payable processes. According to PayStream Advisors, absence of a budget, the perception that current processes are working, and lack of understanding about available solutions are the chief barriers to adoption. Upgrading the accounts payable system may also not be as top-of-mind as other financial priorities, taking a back seat to efforts such as revamping patient collections and streamlining payer reimbursement. One of the biggest advantages of AP systems is that they reduce data entry errors. By automating routine tasks, the system can reduce costly errors that can occur when manual entries are made. Furthermore, AP systems can be used to track payments and invoices, eliminating the need to manually enter information into a spreadsheet.

• Your AP solution must offer role-based permissions so users see only what they need.
• Human intervention and the resulting typos can have an unpleasant impact on your healthcare organization’s ability to process your Accounts Payable invoices in a timely and accurate manner.
• However, what if we tell you there’s another POWERFUL strategy that you can utilize to unlock maximum efficiency and profitability?
• Healthcare organizations may spend many hours each week on manual AP tasks—including invoice entry, chasing approvals, payment scheduling, and documentation.
• MHC NorthStar minimizes all those unnecessary manual steps that lead to irregularities and mitigates the resulting risk.

Having a mix of options can yield the greatest efficiencies and strongest cash flow. Healthcare Accounts Payable can be automated through vendor payments, cross-border transactions, invoice capture, vendor management, purchase order matching, and more. Healthcare organizations are automating manual processes to boost efficiency and enhance revenue cycle performance. The most effective way to reduce patient refund check volume is to get as many patients as possible to pay accounts payable healthcare their medical bills by card or some other electronic option on the provider’s online portal. That way the refund can be delivered over that same efficient payment rail.

A Guide to Replicon’s Features: 7 Ways They Can Help Project-Based Businesses

Global health portals give patients access to medical records, billing, and universal messaging. These systems can provide digital invoices, connecting each bill to the corresponding services provided. There has been an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare industry, and gone are the days of the small, rural doctor’s office. As a result, a growing number of hospitals and smaller cash flow businesses are part of a system of facilities run by a central office.