Automation handles large tasks quickly and accurately. It’s especially effective when there’s not enough humans to tackle big challenges like accounts payable (AP) in the age of COVID.
This is reaching urgent levels in healthcare as back-office burnout and the great resignation hit this field hard, leaving more room for backlogs, mistakes and even more dreaded paper.
With many healthcare organizations behind the curve on business and payments digitization, Beanworks CEO Catherine Dahl thinks AP automation is now a critical focus.
“I’m shocked at how hard it is to find good people in the tech sector,” Dahl told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster. “It’s not going to be any better in the medical sector after two years of a horrible pandemic burning them all out. We used to talk about the baby boomers retiring — well, they’re retired, or almost finished retiring. Who’s coming up behind them to replace them?”
Right now, there’s no clear answer to the personnel problem plaguing the healthcare sector. With hybrid word a fact of life in functions like accounting and finance, much is riding on technology. Add compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other regulations into the mix — not to mention notoriously siloed operations — and the picture becomes even more concerning.
As the need to automate becomes glaring, trendlines are pointing in the right directions.
“Anywhere where you can save money on necessary things, if it can be automated, it should be automated,” Dahl said. “That’s true in any industry, but it’s going to have a bigger impact in the long run within the medical system. If we can get everything laborious and repetitive into an automated state, payables [is] one of many things that patient care and medical services groups need to think about [automating].”
See also: 61% of CFOs Cite Transparency Gains as Perk of AP/AR Digitization
Curing AP Complexity
With as heavily regulated as the industry is, healthcare payments are, by nature, more intricate than retail payments, for example, requiring smarter systems built to work with delicate data.
“Payables is pretty standard in its process,” Dahl told Webster. “But there’s more complexity in the compliance side for medical services, meaning making sure the right person is approving things, which means you need a robust workflow tool to make sure that happens.”
The sheer number and complexity of systems and processes at play makes automation daunting, and it presents a challenge to cloud migration — and compelling case for it.
“With respect to large institutions like hospitals, they tend to have their own systems that are very unique to healthcare,” she said. “And they’re very on-prem, so moving to the cloud is really a challenge, which is where we sit.”
Related: How AP Automation Helps Fight Fraud
Overcoming Technical Debt in AP
But security concerns loom large, and piecing together a tech stack that’s fully compliant is no easy task in and of itself.
As a result, more and more practices weighing the transformative aspects of digital AP are finding that it often isn’t the chief financial officer or medical director nixing digital investments — it’s the IT department.
“They tend to be the blockers of these things, especially in larger organizations,” Dahl said, adding, “IT is changing. It used to be that your systems were internal. As you outsource to Amazon or Azure or Google, you’re relying on their IT teams to make sure everything’s secure.”
IT intractability played a part in Beanworks’ decision to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a decision that’s paying off in the laser-focus remote and hybrid accounting teams are placing on fraud in 2022.
“There’s some [technical] debt in there for the payments rails technology,” Dahl said. “We’re trying to make it easy for the customer, so it feels like a smooth thing for them. But when you factor in KYC (know your customer) and you factor in onboarding vendors and collecting bank information, it is still pretty onerous.”
Dahl envisions getting “to a place where there’s some different way to do the compliance piece so that payments is easier to manage. I see some stuff trending.”
She mentioned Beanworks’ partnership with CorePay, saying, “They’re bringing in some new technologies to automate the KYC process a bit to make it a little bit smoother … That should make that process easier for our customers because we leverage their global platform.”
However it gets done, AP has fundamentally changed, and systems must change with it.
“If you’ve got hybrid model where half your team is at home, then you have no choice but to start adopting tools that are easily accessible everywhere and can get the management of your processes automated through a cloud solution,” Dahl said.
Read more: AI-Powered Payments Platforms Put Paper Processes on Watch
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