Excellent healthcare delivery should be the top priority of any healthcare institution, but generating profits and staying in the pink of financial health is important too. Financial resources are absolutely necessary to attend to patients’ needs with the best doctors’ expertise and the most up-to-date medical equipment. A healthcare institution also needs a dedicated accounting team to oversee aspects of doing business that is essential to its day-to-day operations, such as cash flow, expenses, payments, and regulatory compliance.
That said, many of the accounting problems that plague businesses in other industries also affect the healthcare system. Inefficient and outdated accounting processes can cause a healthcare institution’s finances to go in the red, thus hampering its ability to accommodate more patients and attend to them with the same standard of care. In the wake of healthcare crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s pressure on healthcare organizations to modernize and streamline their operations—including those that have to do with their healthcare accounting.
How do you deal with the troublesome bottlenecks that can get in the way of your own healthcare institution’s mandate? Below is a guide to streamlining your healthcare accounting processes with solutions like software that’s specifically designed for accounting for hospitals and healthcare providers.
Examine Your Accounting Approach for Silos and Unnecessary Steps
The very first thing that you should do is revisit your current accounting workflow to identify the biggest inefficiencies. Take the time to look for hidden problems that cause silos within the accounting department or between the accounting department and other offices in the organization. You will need this knowledge to remedy your healthcare accounting system in the most sustainable way.
For starters, get the numbers behind your accounting system’s worst culprits in terms of time consumption, the most common sources of error and delay, the number of paper invoices and other key accounting documents that have been lost in the past year, and the most common root causes for exceptions or discrepancies. Once you have an idea, institute performance metrics that you want your accounting system to meet in the coming year. Specific improvements can include faster turnovers, increased consistency in meeting accounting deadlines like compliance requirements, and fewer instances of error.
You should aim to come up with a revamped accounting workflow that’s faster, more accurate, and more efficient. This will prepare your institution to use its business acumen to improve its patients’ outcomes and gain sufficient returns at the same time.
Invest in a Healthcare Accounting Solution
Another big improvement that you should make for your organization soon is to invest in a software solution for healthcare accounting. Such a solution will help you consolidate your healthcare accounting data using a single source of truth, eliminating potential discrepancies from inaccurate or outdated records. Dedicated healthcare accounting software will also give you a 360-degree view of your institution’s cash flow and cash management, plus enable access to powerful cloud computing and automation features that can generate quick and up-to-date financial reports.
Your new healthcare accounting software may even allow your organization to transition into an accounting system that’s primarily paperless. Your team ends up being less reliant on manual data entry processes, which are time-consuming and error-prone. In time, they may also be relieved of the need to deal with paper-only documents that are hard to file, easy to lose, and that sometimes come into the system late. For its potential to increase the speed, accuracy, and cost-efficiency of your healthcare accounting processes, a new solution will definitely be worth the investment.
Strengthen Your Payment Systems
It should also be your goal to strengthen your healthcare institution’s current payment system, thus making it a trustworthy asset for paying off your accounts payable (APs) and accepting payments for your accounts receivable (ARs). Make it your priority to improve your payment protocols and to broaden your channels for facilitating payments. Patients and their families should be able to pay using conventional choices like cash and credit card, but also newly emergent payment channels like e-wallets and payment apps.
With a robust payment system, it will be easier to follow your healthcare institution’s payment trails as well as to execute and receive the payments themselves. As a result, you’ll be able to ensure that you have enough money in your organization’s treasury to settle your obligations to employers, suppliers, and providers, as well as to look after your financial interests in the long run.
Sync Up with Technologies Used by Your Partners in the Care Provider Network
One thing that sets healthcare accounting apart from the accounting work that’s done for other industries is that the former involves data and resources from other institutions in a patient’s care provider network. Hospitals and other healthcare institutions regularly work with health maintenance organizations (HMOs), insurers, and government offices that include healthcare as social assistance to their constituents. It’s important for healthcare institutions to be in sync with other providers, especially on money matters.
Knowing that, see what more you can do to integrate your healthcare accounting technologies with those used by your patient care partners. Draft an IT roadmap that can smoothen healthcare accounting processes involving private insurers or government agencies and invest in upgrades that allow for your shared third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) to work more smoothly.
Final Words
Hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare institutions may be known for the work of their doctors and medical staff, but they also rely on the strengths of their accountants, administrators, and other staff members who oversee their financial matters.
You can trust your organization’s accounting and finance team to perform at a high standard if you do the work to streamline your governing healthcare accounting system. Don’t delay in making changes that can ultimately help your healthcare business save more lives.
