What Hospitals Should Know About Automated Invoice Processing

There are thousands of hospitals in the U.S., and the running costs for each of them are typically more than $100 million a year, yet a lot of these facilities tend to have outdated accounts payable processes.

There are so many reasons to consider the automating invoice processing benefits for hospitals. It can help ensure serious mistakes are avoided, keep revenue flowing, and make sure that the hospital has the supplies it needs to provide top-of-the-line patient care.

The following are some important things to know about hospital invoice processing, and more specifically, automated processing.

Costs

With an aging U.S. population and the growing demands placed on healthcare businesses, most hospitals are always looking for ways to cut costs, but they’re also overlooking some of the key areas they could do that easily without diminishing quality of care.

It is estimated that it costs more than $16 to process each manual invoice, so for a medium-sized hospital, these costs could be $250,000 a year or more. It’s a huge amount of money, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the human capital element of the time spent by the AP team. Automation can significantly lower these costs and help hospitals be more efficient in their spending and budgeting.

It’s not just the hard costs of processing invoices manually and administrative employee time to think about either. Hospitals utilizing automated solutions have the opportunity to save money in so many other places as well. For example, they can eliminate storage costs and take advantage of early pay discounts, while cutting out late payment penalties.

More Visibility Into Spending

In line with the ever-increasing importance of sticking to tight budgets, hospitals need complete visibility into spending, and unless they’re automating their AP department, they’re not getting that.

Automated AP solutions provide hospital administrators with an easy, fast way to see in totality where money is being spent, and where changes can be made.

With hospitals not yet using automated AP solutions, there’s no real way to ensure that current vendors are the best option because gaining visibility into spending would be so complex. With an automated solution hospital CFOs can determine whether or not current solutions really are best, or if there are valuable opportunities to make changes.

Compliance

Hospitals operate within one of the most rigid compliance environments in the U.S., and there’s no room for errors or noncompliance. These are issues that can be easily tackled with an automated AP software solution.

Hospitals can set specific rules based on the department and customize them as much as they need, and they can make sure that approvals are done correctly and within the framework of compliance.

When hospitals start using automated AP solutions the benefits are enormous, from cost savings to finding new opportunities to save money. It can also make sure the hospital is operating at a 100 percent compliance level regarding accounts payable, and the AP team can put their focus on other more value-creating areas.

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