Healthcare Administration: How Automation Can Mitigate Challenges
Like most industries, the healthcare sector faces challenges ranging from operational inefficiencies to increasing costs. One of the biggest and most significant developments in healthcare administration sector to help mitigate these challenges is the creation of automation solutions that create efficiency, remove errors, and ensure HIPAA compliance in accounts payable departments.
Creating efficiency
For years, hospitals and healthcare offices have relied on paper records even as other parts of healthcare have moved online. Regrettably, administrative inefficiency and unnecessary paperwork contribute to an unfortunate amount of healthcare waste. Accounts payable professionals spend a lot of time and effort handling paper invoices, chasing approvals, and making payments.
Additionally, the lengthy payment processing time results in high processing costs. Through automation, payments are made faster and AP professionals can take advantage of early payment discounts and avoid late payment penalties. Additionally, healthy and long-term relationships develop between health organizations and suppliers and cases of overpayments and duplicate payments that increase costs for hospitals are reduced dramatically through electronic, or e-invoicing.
Reducing Errors
As opposed to manual invoice processing that is error-prone, accounts payable automation eradicates errors. In some instances, a small mistake in value or billing code can be costly for an organization and result in substantial financial losses. Worse, a mistake can result in information not being covered up to HIPAA standards. The more accounts payable work is done by hand, the higher the possibility exists of numbers, computations, and information being wrong or exposed.
Even the simplest of addition problems can end up in a few hundred dollars-worth of errors, and hours of work to fix the errors. By automating accounts payable there are less errors and the system can be set up to easily recognize inconsistencies and mistakes.
Ensuring Compliance
For good reason, healthcare administration and the industry as a whole have a lot of regulations concerning the information that is being processed to ensure privacy of the patients. With HIPAA regulations and other precautions that should be taken with such sensitive information, many automation solutions simply aren’t qualified to work in healthcare. Enterprise-level automation, however, should be audited for HIPAA compliance and able to respect and manage the sensitivity of the invoices being processed.
While healthcare faces many regulations and requirements, there are flexible, enterprise-level automation solutions that ensure efficiency, control, and compliance in your accounts payable department, while reducing errors and excessive costs.