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April 14, 2023
Does your health system operate a centralized Accounts Payable (AP) department or run decentralized departments and systems? Is your current structure effective and efficient, or is money being leaked through your AP operations? Understanding how your health system’s AP operates and the benefit of different operating models is essential to decision-making. It takes AP one step closer to obtaining a holistic view of its function, what it could improve upon, and where it already excels. What AP Structure is your Health System Using? Centralized AP A truly centralized AP exists when all AP functions and staff across all entities inside […]
February 27, 2023
Account Payable (AP) gets the “short end of the stick” in health systems’ procure to pay (P2P) process. AP is often left resolving exceptions, rushing last-minute payment requests, and struggling to keep the hospital off vendor credit hold. AP corrects upstream P2P mistakes, resulting in more work and backlogs and reducing efficiency. However, many AP departments fail to use one of the most powerful tools available – a recovery audit. Despite recovery audits often having a bad reputation, TAG’s Discovery Review complements AP and Supply Chain departments. We work as an extension of your team to pick up and resolve […]
January 29, 2020
Looking to increase margins and cut costs in your health system’s Procure-to-Pay (P2P) processes? One often-overlooked tool to accomplish this is process mapping or creating a visual representation of organizational processes. This not only identifies costly process gaps but also identifies areas lacking accountability and communication. In healthcare systems’ P2P, commonly broken processes include: Extended processing time for an invoice with incorrect POs Delayed vendor payments Contract price implementation Returning products to suppliers Types of Process Maps By identifying the current and ideal states of processes, organizations can more clearly determine where to deploy resources to drive efficiencies and cut […]
December 26, 2018
The relationships between vendors and healthcare organizations are highly complex and data-intensive. In a perfect world, each of these relationships would be documented and maintained in a hospital’s vendor master list–without fail. Although we don’t live in that perfect world, there are still many steps your health system can take to achieve a best-in-class vendor management system. 1. Make Vendor Management a Priority The first step toward building a better vendor management system is recognizing the inadequacies of your current process. If your system is noticing errors like duplicate payments and returned payments, then there may be a gap in […]
December 18, 2018
Like the vendor master, a hospital’s item master is an immensely powerful set of data that keeps the hospital running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. In our experience, too many health systems view the item master as just another task, rather than the strategic asset we know it is. Let’s take a closer look. Cleaning Up the Item Master An item master full of errors and inconsistencies is more of a liability than an asset. Before you can start seeing the benefits of a well-maintained item master, your organization should commit to correcting existing errors and implementing procedures that prevent […]
October 29, 2018
Process is the secret to an efficient and profitable healthcare system. It’s not enough to simply have one, however. Processes must be documented, understood and followed by team members or they can cost your organization time and money. Let’s take a look at how process mapping avoids these errors and helps achieve business goals. How does poor process cost a hospital money? Every mistake in a hospital, whether it is caused by a human or a computer, has an associated cost to correct it. That could be the time devoted to rekeying an invoice that was entered incorrectly or the […]
October 10, 2018
Your AP software system likely contains a host of features to prevent duplicate payments or overpayments–but we never recommend relying on software alone to catch every error. As we like to say: your AP software is only as smart as your staff. The Audit Group’s Natalie Berkley explains a recent example in which our client had been paying the same vendor twice because of a mistake in the vendor master. Cleansing and maintaining your vendor list is the best way to prevent duplicate payments like this, but taking the time to do so is not always easy for an AP […]
