Healthcare leaders across the continuum of care seek automated solutions from purchasing to payment that lead to time and cost savings, streamline workflows, and optimize visibility and accountability between financial executives and procurement officials.
For many, this journey begins with the realization that inefficient and cumbersome procurement processes are putting strains on staff and impacting the bottom line. Leadership across many industries today is realizing the need for an automated healthcare procurement solution. Evaluating Procure-to-Pay solutions in healthcare in particular involves a complex series of considerations. However, they can be broken down into component pieces that help with the task of evaluating the whole.
Should Your Automated P2P Solution Partner Specialize in Healthcare?
Because of logistical realities and systemic culture, and factors including risk aversion and high compliance thresholds in operations and care providing the healthcare industry has historically trailed other fields in implementing automation and technological solutions that streamline and optimize time-consuming processes.
From crucial back-office workflows including purchasing and procurement to accounts payable and invoicing payments, healthcare organizations including post-acute care and non-acute care have their own needs for purchase orders, invoicing, inventory maintenance, and payment processes.
This isn’t to suggest that a company that doesn’t specialize in healthcare cannot meet the automated procure-to-pay software needs of a senior living facility, physician’s office, urgent care, skilled nursing facility, or ambulatory surgical center. With a wide variety of technology solutions and software on the market, leaders would do well to consider all their options.
But there are advantages to working with an automated procure-to-pay solution partner with extensive experience in healthcare, including:
- The benefits of customized elements in procurement processes, such as detailed category alignment and contract management for pricing goods and services specific to healthcare.
- Knowing that your procure-to-pay partner is not offering an add-on or afterthought procurement software solution “out of the box.”
- During implementation, work with professionals with experience in the healthcare sphere who can understand the range of supply chain needs at your facility or system and coordinate with your procurement team.
- After implementation, have healthcare-focused service professionals who can continue to grow, streamline, and adapt with you and your team.
The Procurement Partners’ Difference
Procurement Partners’ solutions help healthcare organizations take control of their procurement processes from ordering and purchasing to invoicing and payment. Because Procurement Partners works exclusively in the healthcare industry, it offers P2P software advantages including:
- Training and implementing an end-to-end e-procurement solution built for each customer, with a deep knowledge of the healthcare industry across the continuum of care.
- Total flexibility, and no restrictions in terms of which vendors or GPOs each customer chooses to work with in inventory and procurement in the P2P process.
- System solutions such as punch-out, which enables custom ordering outside regular lists of vendors, while still prioritizing spend management and supplier relationships.
- A solution that is not tied to any outside relationships, which means no preferential vendors.
- Procurement Partners only does automated solutions for procure-to-pay, with no ties that would influence vendor selection.
Functionality and Capabilities
When looking at options for procure-to-pay automation and how it can streamline your purchasing and workflow, leadership and teams must meet and come to an alignment on what manual processes in purchasing, inventory, and payment need to be automated and updated. Features of P2P automation you will likely focus upon include:
- Ordering capacities that are streamlined and easy-to-use, so that it’s easy to train internal users, new hires, and over-burdened employees in times of under-staffing and a tight labor market. Automation software makes approval workflows and other tasks far more routine.
- Real-time automated approvals, to ensure that inventory management needs are consistently met in a typically fast-paced and complex healthcare provider environment.
- Invoice approval and invoice processing automation and accounts payable integration, so that invoicing and payments are done on time and accurately, aligning purchasing with the finance team and assuring better supplier management.
- General ledger coding, for accurately categorized data and accounts within the purchasing financial system.
- Budget maintenance, for a real-time line of sight on spend visibility to budget, is a crucial business need that also drastically lowers human error.
Procurement Partners’ Functions and Capabilities
Because of Procurement Partners’ experience and expertise as a health-care-only procure-to-pay process automation solution, our customers’ journey from procurement to payment is notable for:
- Oversight to spend in all areas, with GL coding for every product and service encompassed in the system, detailed and applied immediately to each budgetary department.
- A real-time, true accounting of spend-to-budget adjusted with each purchase aligned with accounting systems.
- Alerts and notifications around spend compliance ensure accountability, better visibility, and compliance.
- Trailblazing innovation in the healthcare space with SimpleAP, which provides healthcare organizations with 100% AP (Accounts Payable) automation including optical recognition of hard-copy invoices for a complete Accounts Payable workflows solution unlike any other on the market.
Looking to Reduce Your Annual Spend?
Procurement Partners helps customers reduce their annual spend by more than 10% with an easy-to-navigate procure-to-pay solution where users can place orders and process invoices for all suppliers. Procurement Partners is the leading procure-to-pay management system for post-acute, non-acute, and continuum of care providers and has helped organizations achieve 40% time savings and 95% supplier contract compliance through automating the procure-to-pay process.
