Building interconnected healthcare financial ecosystems

Pressures in the healthcare finance field

• Liquidity management

  Healthcare facilities, like other business entities, must maintain sufficient liquidity to pay vendors, staff, and debtors on time without disrupting long-term investments. Ensuring readily available assets to cover short-term and upcoming payment obligations is crucial for stable operations and effective cash management in healthcare.

• Cash visibility

  Achieving cash visibility is vital for effective treasury and liquidity management in healthcare finance. It provides a clear picture of an organization’s working capital, allowing treasurers to make strategic investments and utilize cash management structures effectively. This leads to minimized debt and interest costs, better-informed hedging decisions, reduced bank fees, and accurate predictions of future cash positions.

• Payment diversity

  The digital transformation in finance has introduced various digital payment methods, such as mobile payments, real-time payments, "buy now, pay later" options, and earned wage access. This diversity increases the number of data sources and amplifies the demand for automation.

• Cost containment

  Cost containment is a comprehensive strategy crucial for reducing an organization’s existing costs and controlling current and future expenses. Enhancing cash visibility and automating healthcare finance tasks, such as reducing labor-intensive manual data transfers and processing paper-based invoices and procurement documents, are effective approaches to cost containment.

Key challenges and solutions

Challenge 1: Cash visibility

Cash visibility is one of the most pressing challenges in the healthcare treasury field. Inadequate visibility can lead to financial inefficiencies and missed investment opportunities.

The problem arises from the scattered nature of crucial data among various partners like banks, electronic lockbox providers, and clearinghouses. Retrieving vital payer information often involves navigating through numerous web portals, resulting in data flow bottlenecks and decision-making delays.

WaveAccess addresses this by consolidating data from various sources into a unified view of cash movements, creating a healthcare financial management platform that provides a single interface to monitor all cash processes.

A unified platform provides a single interface to monitor all cash processes

The results speak for themselves:

• We automate data transfers to eliminate financial waste and human errors;

• We streamline data aggregation from various sources;

• We introduce new analytical dashboards for in-depth key metric analysis.

Challenge 2: Lack of control over spending

Limited control over spending is another significant concern for healthcare financial leaders. Many healthcare organizations use spend management suites (such as Coupa, Procurify, Medius, etc.) for procurement management, invoicing, expense control, and cost optimization. However, others still rely on multiple unconnected systems. For example, they might generate purchase orders in one system, manage vendor data in another, and process payments in a third. This leads to a fragmented spend management process that often results in errors, poor spending control, and difficulties in cost optimization.

Is this really a serious issue? The consequences suggest so: budget overruns and financial strain can weaken a facility’s financial standing, making it harder to secure financing and reducing opportunities for growth and investment. Other possible repercussions include errors in purchasing and payments, and even the risk of procurement fraud. Clearly, this is a matter deserving close attention.

At WaveAccess, we assist our clients by streamlining the creation and tracking of purchase orders and invoices on a unified platform. This platform consolidates vendor information and requisition processes, aligning them with procurement and payment workflows for a cohesive approach to procurement. The essential part of a possible solution is a portal for analyzing spending patterns, identifying opportunities for cost reduction, automating optimization strategies, and accessing visualized real-time data.

Streamlining the creation and tracking of purchase orders and invoices on a unified platform

Challenge 3: Lack of interconnectivity and API integrations

When organizations use multiple systems to streamline their workflows, they often encounter a lack of connectivity between these platforms. Although many Software as a Service (SaaS) and on-premise products provide API access to their data, this capability is frequently overlooked or hindered by a lack of technical expertise within organizations to implement efficient data flows through these APIs. As a result, financial professionals are forced to engage in time-consuming, error-prone manual data transfers, incurring significant time and budgetary costs.

Our team establishes seamless connections between the client’s corporate systems (for example, a ERP) and external systems (for example, a bank account), ensuring smooth data exchange. We can also build a custom portal that allows users to access multiple customer accounts from a single platform, empowering them with automated processing capabilities, operational optimizations, and single sign-on for internal systems.

Addressing the issue of lack of interconnectivity and API integrations

Wave.Integrate — our comprehensive solution

Our expertise, backed by over 20 years in healthcare IT and system integration, is complemented by our ready-to-go integration platform, Wave.Integrate. It serves as a scalable, adaptable, and configurable platform for data migration and synchronization, representing a significant leap forward in data management solutions.

With this tool, we create seamless integrations between internal and external systems, adapting to our clients’ distinct business processes, and handling multiple data formats, all while automating workflows.

Feel free to reach out to explore the best approaches for optimizing your healthcare finance processes and ensuring financial efficiency.