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October 25, 2019
We recently published a blog discussing the impact of outdated and incomplete vendor master files. Your vendor master reduces the risk of fraud and payment errors for health systems. Now we walk you through the laborious steps involved in cleaning up, validating, and maintaining your vendor master. STEP 1: Inspect the Current Vendor Master File Inspecting and assessing your current data is the most time-consuming part of a vendor data cleanse. Begin by identifying and collecting all of your relevant documentation, vendor files, and data sources. Once all the necessary information is collected, import to your preferred data management platform […]
September 10, 2019
On average, health systems work with over 27,500 vendors at a given time with seven percent of those vendors changing their name, affiliation, or standing on an annual basis. With such a large number and variability of vendors, managing vendor data can quickly become cumbersome for an organization’s Accounts Payable (AP) department creating exposure to payment errors, fraudulent charges, and risk of noncompliance. To minimize these risks, AP departments or the parties responsible for the vendor master must keep their master file current and free of errors by performing a vendor master cleanse and maintain the file on a quarterly […]
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 […]
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 […]
