The New ROI – Invoice ROI™: Reconciliation, Optimization, Intelligence

This article was written by Lisa Miller.

VIE Healthcare has been at the forefront of purchased services technology since 1999. Our expertise has resulted in a patented technology which guarantees margin improvement – Invoice ROI™ – the new ROI for healthcare.

Purchased services spend can account for up to 45% of a hospital’s non-labor spend. Our invoice reconciliation technology enables us to understand your hospital’s spend history and deliver real time data with full visibility and actionable intelligence.

Invoice ROI™ – Reconciliation – Optimization – Intelligence

Reconciliation

Because of the extreme manual nature of getting to the line item purchased services data, most hospitals start with benchmarking from their agreements instead of performing a line item analysis of their invoices, missing out on vital opportunities for cost savings.

Our strategy begins with a deep dive into the past 12-18 months of your invoice data and our patented technology inputs the specific purchased services agreement into a customized database and immediately reconciles the agreement terms to your invoices. This line item analysis identifies hidden costs in your invoices which are often the result of pricing errors and off-contract spend. During this process we also identify trends in utilization.

Line item analysis is the most critical part of the entire process and essential to drive significant savings.

Line item analysis of your hospital’s invoices is essential to drive savings in your purchased services spend. Click To Tweet

To begin, we recommend that you identify a single target area, for example, dietary, and analyze 12-18 months of invoice data while considering the following:

• Is this item on credit spend?
• Examine rebates, credits or incentives included in the agreement.
• Is there a variation in the fee?
• Do opportunities exist for standardization?
• Visit the facilities of your current provider to understand how their operational system works.
• Review the gaps and the potential service issues to understand where your costs lie.

At VIE Healthcare, we gather, interpret and analyze multiple invoices to identify issues in areas including trends, purchase patterns, outliers and utilization improvement opportunities.

In one case, working with a regulated medical waste provider, VIE Healthcare discovered that:

• Over 25% of spend was outside the agreed contract.
• Of the 75% that was in the contract, only 60% of that matched the stated contract price.

Optimization

Invoice ROI™ combines line details with other data inputs that identify trends, variations, quality and utilization improvement opportunities for pro-active monthly management of outsourced purchased services spend.

Invoice ROI™ enables your hospital to view spending trends and achieve significant cost savings. Many healthcare organizations we work with believe they cannot renegotiate purchased services agreements and accept annual price increases each year. However, by closely analyzing your agreements, it is possible for your hospital to renegotiate your vendor agreements and realize significant cost savings.

Intelligence

Our patented Invoice ROI™ system delivers actionable intelligence and offers a complete solution for managing, monitoring and reducing your purchased services spend.

Invoice ROI™ overcomes the challenges faced by hospitals in their line item analysis of purchased services invoices, helping them to effectively manage the overwhelming volumes of data and complex invoices, saving your hospital money while eliminating your manual processes.

6 Categories of Purchased Spend

At VIE Healthcare, we have created a framework which uses six categories of purchased services spend for the purpose of reconciliation:

• Clinical
• Facilities/Support
• Finance/HR/HIM
• Biomed/Service/Maintenance
• IT/Telecom/Telehealth
• Administrative

Our Invoice ROI™ provides:

• Automated invoice reconciliation of purchased services invoices to contracts.
• Automated purchased services line item utilization optics.
• Real-time purchased services intelligence.

Every month.

This vital insight empowers your hospital to project and control future costs with confidence and accuracy.

Discover the new ROI – Invoice ROI™ from VIE Healthcare.