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June 4, 2019
Duplicate payments have been among one of the leading sources of leaking resources in healthcare systems for decades. Health systems in the United States lose over $500 million to duplicate payments annually. That’s right, duplicate payments are a half-billion-dollar per year mistake. Imagine what your healthcare organization could do if they saved those funds each year – update facilities, offer new services, treat more patients, upgrade to the latest technologies, or hire more resources. It’s time for your organization to take a more proactive approach to mitigate the risks associated with “dupes” and save resources that directly affect your patient’s […]
October 15, 2018
Duplicate payments are a large issue in most hospital and healthcare systems. As a category duplicate payments make up the third-largest area in TAG’s hospital AP recovery audits. Often “dupe” payments occur through data entry mistakes, or human error. In one example, an invoice number was entered incorrectly, causing a $187,607 duplicate payment when a hospital later re-entered the invoice data correctly and made a second payment. It’s inevitable in manual processes: keying errors will occur. However, these types of errors can be reduced or mitigated by establishing and following standard practices. Six Tips for Hospitals to Reduce Duplicate […]
August 29, 2018
We’ve written at length about the value of vendor maintenance and why it pays to understand how each vendor invoices and credits your organization. For as often as your billing team may make a payment error, the vendor may make a billing error that costs your organization thousands without you even realizing it. Our own John Martin’s tenacity with vendors helped recover a six-figure sum for one of our clients after discovering inconsistent pricing. Keeping your vendor list well-organized and frequently reviewing it are the best ways to prevent errors like contract overpayments, duplicate payments, and missed discounts. For busy […]
July 17, 2018
Duplicate Payments, Overcharges and Returned Goods constitute more than two-thirds of all TAG recovery claims. The lack of a proper vendor tracking program can result in hidden financial waste in a hospital’s procure-to-pay process. What This Means to Hospitals and Healthcare Systems If the Vendor Master File is not updated regularly, discrepancies in invoices and Purchase Orders may go approved without researching root causes, leading to overcharges. When vendor mergers or acquisitions occur, duplicate payments are more likely to occur due to duplicate vendor numbers that appear to be separate entities. ERP systems often cannot catch these duplicate payments across […]
June 14, 2018
Your Accounts Payable department probably uses a nice software system that is packed full of features to prevent duplicate payments and other payment errors. However, the effectiveness of AP software systems is reduced when the software allows an invoice to be paid under two different vendor numbers — even if they have the same invoice header information. AP Software Systems Can’t Distinguish Human Error We’ve seen it time and again. Issues with your ERP system arise, only to find out that human error or improper data entry lead to lost funds. Your AP software systems are only as smart as your […]
December 19, 2017
Working in Accounts Payable or Finance, you know it is important to keep your vendors and purchase orders well-organized. This means ensuring that each vendor is identified by a single number. Multiple vendor numbers for a single vendor or partner can cause issues, like duplicate payments. How AP Software Handles Multiple Vendor Numbers Many Accounts Payable software systems have control features that exist to prevent the same invoice from being paid twice. However, this software is unable to recognize when a vendor has been added twice under two different vendor numbers. Because these systems identify the vendor based on the […]
December 4, 2017
In any Accounts Payable department, you may run into open-ended purchase orders. Especially in a major healthcare system, open-ended purchase orders are problematic because they prevent ERP systems from identifying overpayments or flagging duplicate invoices for review. Avoid these issues with open-ended purchase orders by putting effective purchasing controls in place and carefully processing each invoice by your system’s standard. Open-Ended Purchase Orders Cause Overpayment for a Health System During a recent audit, TAG worked with a large healthcare system to find overpayments and lost funds. We uncovered that the system had an open-ended purchase order with Johnson & Johnson, and […]
