The Healthcare Hub
ePayables: The Right Prescription for Chronic Payment Pain Points
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Darci Guerrein, Vice President of Payment Operations
Although the majority of payment processes in healthcare remain paper intensive, there’s a growing commitment across the industry to bring increased levels of automation to healthcare payables processes.
That’s because automation can effectively address two of the primary ‘pain points’ faced by suppliers and providers: spiraling payment acceptance costs and lack of visibility across all trading partners.
One of the greatest imperatives for suppliers and providers is to overcome the high costs of today’s inefficient, manual, and error-prone payables processes. These processes are costing the industry millions of dollars annually. For providers, the lack of automation means staff must follow an order all the way through from requisition to payment, with different layers of manual processes. Labor costs soar and the procure to pay cycle slows. Suppliers must accommodate the disparate and inefficient processes of its multiple trading partners, increasing labor costs further.
This is one of the primary reasons that GHX has invested in epayable solutions. Our mission is to increase automation and efficiency with the goal of cutting unnecessary healthcare costs. Automating the payments process is one of those critical areas where we can amplify savings for both providers and suppliers by streamlining all stages of the payment process. This allows the trading partners to have a unified approach to handling invoice to payment processes.
The improved efficiency gives providers and suppliers greater visibility into the entire payment process, and staff currently focused on payment processing and/or credit collections can focus on more strategic and value-added activities. For example, with increased levels of automation, a provider can reallocate staff to monitor the purchasing process and contract compliance and pricing initiatives. This helps them better understand which types of products are being purchased, from which trading partners, and determine necessary adjustments that will further decrease costs within the supply chain.
The benefits of epayables automation are many-fold, from driving increased revenues through better cash flow, to reduced back office expenses. All of this combined supports the industry’s shared objective to work more efficiently so the focus can be on providing outstanding patient care. Check out more posts on the value of epayables.