Healthcare Business Best Practices: Spend Less by Adapting More
In the last couple of decades, the healthcare sector has been under intense pressure to adapt to business advances. However, the sector hasn’t adopted these changes. The growing costs, mass inefficiency, and staff shortage that override the healthcare industry forcing change to happen. By adapting in these three healthcare business best practices, you will cut your cost.
Investing in Technology
While many health focused companies are looking for advancements in medicines and consumer tech they rarely look for the newest business efficiency technology. Adapting to healthcare business best practices breaks down cost by helping to streamline operations and increase efficiency. Technologies such as AP automation have numerous benefits for healthcare businesses. Unfortunately, healthcare’s slow and unstable embrace of technology hinders organizations from enjoying these benefits.
How it saves
- Faster approvals: AP automation tech offers interfaces that give you more visibility into accounts payable activities. Typically AP automation decreases approval time by 80%. It reduces the probability of late payment penalties, and businesses get dynamic discounting –early payment discounts.
- Reduce duplicate payments and overpayments. Health businesses lose loads of money through overpayment and duplicate payments. AP automation reduces incidents of intentional and unintentional overpayment, duplicate payment, and other fraudulent payments.
Reducing Transaction Cost
AP automation can help healthcare businesses cut costs and attain massive cost savings that can be directed to improving patient outcomes. When businesses continue to be slow to change, they miss these cost savings and continue to incur huge operational and administrative expenses. Hospitals have vast operating expenses that contribute significantly to rising healthcare costs. An average hospital with a capacity of 160 beds, for example, incurs approximately $2,200 per day summing up to $130 million annually in operating costs.
AP automation can reduce the operating costs of a health business substantially by reducing the costs of manual invoice processing. An average hospital spends approximately $16 to process an invoice manually adding up to $250,000 per annum. The costs become staggering for big health businesses with thousands of invoices processed monthly.
How it Saves
- Cutting invoice processing costs: AP automation reduces the cost of processing a single invoice from $10 to around $3. With iPayables AP automation the cost of processing an invoice is reduced to around $1-2 per invoice.
Reducing Employee Cost
In addition to these hard costs, AP professionals spend countless hours and intense effort processing invoices manually. AP professionals have to input invoices into the computer, secure approval from the required persons, and process payments. In the processing of payments, health businesses incur soft costs such as check processing, postage, and transaction costs. The manual processing of invoices poses numerous risks including invoice loss, misplaced invoices, duplicate payments, overpayment, and late payment penalties.
AP professionals don’t need to process thousands of invoices manually and spend time and money entering invoices into computers, chasing approvals, and submitting invoices for payment. They can shift their invoice processing to electronic invoicing. AP automation solutions such like iPayables is a healthcare business best practices company meant to implement these savings.
How it Saves
- Reducing labor: your healthcare business does not require many AP professionals because most of AP tasks are automated. AP professionals focus on value-additional tasks that boost your organization’s bottom line.
- Eliminating the risks associated with manual invoice processing like invoice loss, duplicate payments, and errors. Errors in invoices, for example, can be very costly for an organization and cause immense financial loss.
With all these healthcare business best practices cost-saving possibilities, adopting AP automation is one of the easiest to make. When businesses become skeptical about change, they miss the reduced operational costs and savings that come with technology. Health businesses shouldn’t be fearful of change but adopt it warmly to not only benefit themselves but also patients and healthcare as a whole. They can save tens, hundreds and even thousands of dollars by shifting from manual invoice processing to electronic invoicing. A business spends less money on administrative processes and operational costs and more money on its core competencies when it adopts technological advances in payments.