The Healthcare Hub
How GHX ePay Optimizes and Streamlines Payment Processes
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Kara L. Nadeau, Healthcare Industry Contributor
In the dynamic landscape of healthcare payments, transitioning to efficient and secure processes is essential. GHX ePay represents a forward step, simplifying transactions between providers and suppliers. This electronic payment system supports provider organizations in their quest for improved operational efficiency and financial management, facilitating smoother, more secure payments to their suppliers.
Table of contents
- What is GHX ePay?
- Key Features of GHX ePay
- Benefits for Healthcare Providers
- How To Implement GHX ePay
Overview: GHX ePay
GHX ePay is a healthcare payment automation platform that facilitates electronic payments from healthcare providers to their suppliers. The solution serves as a foundation for modernizing healthcare payment processes, helping to eliminate the need for paper checks and facilitating more secure healthcare transactions between trading partners. ePay leverages the GHX supplier payment network to facilitate a more efficient, mutually beneficial payment process.
Revolutionizing Electronic Payments in Healthcare
Health systems and hospitals face intense pressure to operate more efficiently, reduce costs and increase revenue. Manual processes, in which Accounts Payable (AP) teams print paper checks and mail them to suppliers, can be time-consuming, labor intensive and expensive. This often results in late payments and missed opportunities for savings.
Digital, automated healthcare payment solutions designed to streamline healthcare payments can significantly reduce paper checks and the associated costs, labor and fraud exposure, while facilitating faster payments to suppliers.
GHX ePay vs. Traditional Payment Methods
The traditional payment method, where AP teams print and mail paper checks to suppliers, falls short in this modern digital business environment. A healthcare organization that has taken steps to optimize other processes for efficiency and cost savings, is missing out on a huge opportunity if their AP team is still relying on manual transactions and sealing/stamping/mailing envelopes.
“With regards to cash flow, we have to make these payments today or tomorrow, so why not leverage an electronic process to pay them on time and benefit from greater efficiency?”
NMHS Director of Supply Chain and Clinical Consulting,
GHX ePay advantages over conventional payment processes:
- automate manual processes to increase staff productivity
- reduce healthcare supply chain costs
- facilitate collaboration among providers and their suppliers
- present actionable data and analytics to drive better decisions and improved financial performance.
Key Features
GHX ePay is designed to address the pain points experienced by AP teams in health systems and hospitals today.
1. Automated Payments
Healthcare payment automation increases process efficiency and transaction accuracy by minimizing human intervention. With GHX ePay, provider healthcare organizations can extend P2P process automation to supplier payments, helping to eliminate paper checks and manual reconciliation tasks.
2. A Broad Payment Network
GHX ePay digitally connects health systems and hospitals with healthcare’s largest supplier payment network, allowing them to optimize AP processes across their entire trading partner networks. With more than 19k supplier divisions (>600 manufacturers) in the GHX payment network, a provider can onboard suppliers to expedite payments, capture more rebates and improve their bottom line.
3. Enhanced Security and Compliance Features
GHX ePay supports secure healthcare transactions, with GHX storing and managing supplier banking data for decreased risk. Healthcare payment automation helps eliminate check payments, which can also reduce the risk for fraud[1].
4. Visibility for Cashflow Predictability
Modernizing healthcare payments through GHX ePay provides AP teams with greater visibility into their payment processes. With payments digitally generated and delivered within a unified payment platform, providers can access data and insights for improved financial management in healthcare, including cash management, forecasting and cost savings strategies.
5. Flexibility: Complements Current Bank Partners
GHX ePay allows provider organizations the opportunity to work with their existing bank partners or leverage GHX’s multi-bank network to streamline healthcare payments. They can use multiple payment methods, including ACH, cards and lines of credit, as digital payment solutions through GHX ePay.
6. Scale and Modernize Healthcare Payments
Change is inevitable in healthcare, especially with mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on the rise. GHX ePay is designed to scale healthcare payment automation as a health system grows and is adaptable to supplier changes as well.
For example, whenever Northwestern Medicine integrates with a new health system or a supplier undergoes a merger or acquisition, GHX helps both parties properly map changes (e.g., bill-to, sold-to and ship-to locations) in their respective systems to prevent errors moving forward.
Benefits of Streamlining Payments in Healthcare
Provider healthcare organizations that use GHX ePay to streamline healthcare payments have documented operational and financial improvements.
1. Efficiency Gains and Cost Reduction
Paper invoice and payment processes can cost as much as $22B per year across the healthcare industry, and 85% of healthcare purchasing is still done manually via paper checks [2]. Healthcare payment automation through ePay can help alleviate this cost burden for providers and their trading partners.
2. Capture More Rebate
GHX ePay users can achieve 90% prompt payments and pay suppliers within 15 days, on average [3]. With more efficient payment processes in healthcare, health systems and hospitals can increase revenue by capitalizing on supplier early pay discounts and rebates.
How much can your organization save by integrating payment systems in healthcare into end-to-end P2P automation?
Click here to calculate your estimated savings with GHX digital invoice and payment solutions.
3. Improve Financial Management in Healthcare
Increased rebate capture through GHX ePay digital payment solution can not only help healthcare providers offset operational costs, but also put financial health back into their organizations’ ecosystems.
4. Higher payment volume drives efficiency and savings
Once GHX ePay is deployed for an initial group of suppliers, healthcare organizations can then expand its digital payment network during the onboarding process for new suppliers. The higher the volume of electronic and automated payments, the greater the efficiency, cost reduction and savings.
How To Implement GHX ePay
“The ePay solution is easy to implement in that there is very little work for the customer. We send an electronic feed of invoices to the ePay system every night, and GHX does all of the work for us to get those suppliers paid. We see the benefit of rebates generated through our card program and of not having to manually process those invoices.”
Nebraska Methodist Health System (NMHS) Director of Supply Chain and Clinical Consulting,
Implementing GHX ePay is efficient and cost effective, and it can be completed in as little as 4–6 weeks. GHX provides an implementation consultant, who will guide you throughout the process. The consultant leads scheduled calls during the implementation period to keep everything moving along and everyone in the loop.
Here are the basic steps for ePay implementation:
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Identify your stakeholders and expected ePay go-live date.
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Roll out ePay first to your priority list of vendors. GHX will notify the initial group of suppliers of the go-live date.
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Complete and submit credit card program documents for V-card program participants as part of your secure healthcare transactions.
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Set up a dedicated demand deposit account for rebate maximization with the bank of your choice to optimize financial management in healthcare.
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Complete ePay user training in just a few hours.
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Send the first file, determine how you want to handle exceptions, review with GHX and enjoy the benefits of modernizing healthcare payments through ePay.
FAQs about GHX ePay
Q. What is GHX ePay and how does it work?
A. GHX ePay is a healthcare payment automation solution that streamlines payment processes in healthcare by replacing manual processes and paper checks with digital transactions.
Q. What are the benefits of using GHX ePay in healthcare payment processing?
A. ePay reduces the time and effort AP teams spend on payments with more efficient payment processes. It improves accuracy through digital PO/invoice/payment matching and reconciliation.
Q. How does GHX ePay help security and compliance?
A. GHX ePay supports secure healthcare transactions by helping to eliminate paper checks. Additionally, GHX stores and manages supplier banking data to reduce risk among provider customers.
Q. How does GHX ePay compare to traditional payment methods?
A.The ePay digital healthcare payment solution replaces manual, paper-based payment processes with automated, digital transactions.
Sources
- 2023 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey
- Visa Navigate. B2B healthcare in the U.S.: The next frontier for digital payments. Veronica Fernandez.
- Based on GHX internal statistics, industry information, and assumptions based on industry information. Actual customer results may vary and are dependent on a variety of factors, including the level of customer engagement with GHX's payment and invoicing tools. GHX gives no assurance or guarantee that the same results or potential savings will be obtainable or prove to be correct.
Kara L. Nadeau
Healthcare Industry Contributor
Kara L. Nadeau has more than 20 years of experience as a writer for the healthcare industry, working for clients in fields including medical device/supply manufacturers and distributors; software, solution and service providers; hospitals and health systems; and industry associations.