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How To Use BPA Software To Meet Accounts Payable Challenges in Healthcare
Accounts payable is subject to a lot of strange rules and regulations. Few industries feel this pain as much as businesses in healthcare. AP in healthcare faces a series of unique challenges because of information laws like HIPAA and coding systems like ICD-10. Paperwork and payments come from a wide variety of different insurance companies, as well as the federal government for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements.
These regulations are essential and some of the challenges are unavoidable, but they can slow down processing and make AP an inefficient and expensive process. How can healthcare companies improve their turnaround time and reduce processing costs while still complying with all the necessary regulations?
Automating accounts payable processing with Business Process Automation (BPA) software is an effective way to ease the burden on the AP department. Implementing BPA software lets you cut costs, streamline invoice processing, and comply with regulations. It’s a simple, effective solution that provides the tools you need to meet the AP challenges unique to healthcare.
Onboarding Electronic Receipt
One of the big ways that BPA software helps meet AP challenges is by digitizing invoice receipt. Many healthcare companies report receiving half of their volume or more in paper invoices. Paper invoices slow down processing and carry the potential problem of data entry errors if people input data from the invoices manually. Paper is also easier to misplace, possibly leading to late payments if an invoice gets lost.
Even with the restrictions of HIPAA, there are lots of ways you can bring invoices with sensitive information into your AP system without using paper. Much of this could be automated through a standardized electronic data interchange (EDI) process that goes through a secure FTP server. In addition, incorporating secure email servers will allow your suppliers to send invoices through their email accounts instead! Any amount of digital intake can improve your AP department’s turnaround time while reducing costs quickly.
For invoices that still arrive on paper, the scanning technology built into quality AP automation software can dramatically reduce errors and streamline AP workflow. Look for a software platform that offers Optical Character Recognition (OCR) image capture and image indexing. With these features, you’ll get an editable and searchable digital document, and the system will also log all the metadata related to that document.
Simplify and Automate Routing
One major problem healthcare companies face is long AP cycles that keep their cash flow off balance. Often, this has to do with complex approval processes. Some of this approval is necessary, but systems can easily become overly complex when some people just need to be made aware of an invoice’s receipt and have no real approval authority.
Where possible, cut your approval chains down. For any invoices that don’t require manual approval, you can customize the automation software to auto-approve invoices meeting certain requirements. For invoices that do require manual approval and review, the software will automatically send reminder emails to keep the approval process moving.
Work with suppliers to have identifying information, like department codes or people’s names, printed on their invoices so that invoices can find their home more easily. It’s also helpful to automate your purchasing and accounts payable departments at the same time with software from the same supplier. That way, the software can easily communicate and automatically cross-reference purchase orders and invoices.
ERP software can struggle with the complexity of routing needed in healthcare, but integrating it with AP automation software allows you to construct varying routes and authority delegation so you can accelerate the process. BPA software works alongside existing ERPs to add more robust financial processing tools.
Holistic Procure-to-Pay Project Scope
To truly solve the problems in Accounts Payable, you have to look beyond it. If you only focus on analyzing your AP processes, you’ll leave out several key areas that can cause major dysfunction, including purchasing, intake, and payment. BPA solutions can help by automating the entire procure-to-pay process.
In a healthcare setting, it can be difficult to utilize purchase orders effectively, but many companies have been able to automate some of their purchasing processes. Complex supply chains, intermediaries, hidden costs, inventory management, and the possibility for inaccuracies in ordering information all pose major challenges to purchasing in the healthcare industry. Automation software can help by tracking real costs, simplifying supplier management, checking orders for accuracy, and supporting inventory management.
Having an automated intake process can greatly improve your turnaround times for invoice processing. If you can’t automate, consider outsourcing this process to a third-party that can make use of a larger scanning space and better equipment to do the job more efficiently.
Payment automation has the potential to shave hours off your AP process every day. The Payments as a Service (PaaS) model makes managing payment services much more efficient compared to traditional, batch-based manual payments. With this type of automation, you stay in control of payments, but the software provider takes care of data storage, networking, software updates, and issuing vendor payments in the preferred format (paper check, ACH transfer, etc.). All you’ll need to do is provide the payment information and use the software application to make payments.
HIPAA-Compliant NextProcess for Your BPA Needs
Although healthcare is a specialized industry, BPA software can provide the tools you need to help your company’s AP department succeed. You may decide that working with a third-party Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider is going to be the best solution for you, but be sure to do your research. Not all providers are prepared to handle the requirements of the healthcare industry.
Finding the right partner is critical to meeting the unique challenges of accounts payable in healthcare. With NextProcess, our HIPAA-compliant intake process and software platform allows you to process invoices without fear of PHI being compromised. You can easily configure the software to ensure that you’re always in compliance with the latest rules and regulations. Contact us today to learn more or set up a free demo.
