Baptist Health, a large Miami-based healthcare provider, is built on a culture of quality and dedication. With over 27,000 employees and 4,000 physicians, it serves over 1.8 million patients every year with state-of-the-art surgical, diagnostic, and urgent care services rooted in compassion, generosity, and commitment to excellence.
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Baptist Health has a robust supply chain operation to ensure providers have the disposables, capital equipment, and surgical items to deliver quality care. Due to the complexity of managing pricing between the GPO, distributor, and hundreds of suppliers, it’s common for invoices to exceed the price agreed upon in the purchase order (PO).
These are called “match exceptions.”
Like many healthcare providers, Baptist Health handled these match exceptions manually. Manual match exception resolution results in inefficient processes, overpayment, payment delays, duplicate payments, and errors, leading to revenue losses.
Baptist Health needed a consistent, visible, and accountable process rooted in technology to reclaim the financial losses caused by match exceptions. Penrod collaborated to solve this challenge.
Eliminating the overpayments, late payments, duplicate payments, manual effort, and errors caused by match exceptions
HealthChain, a highly automated match exception resolution component for Salesforce
Faster Resolution Time, Significantly Reduced Match Exceptions, and Less Manual Work
Baptist Health had the data it needed to resolve match exceptions. However, that information existed across disparate platforms, including the ERP system, business intelligence, and email application, rendering it unactionable.
Without integrating all these systems, Baptist Health didn’t have the source of truth needed to make data actionable and drive the proper communications at the right time.
Baptist Health employees manually worked thousands of match exceptions without an automated process. Match exception resolution involved researching the error, deploying a call to action to resolve it, and monitoring for responses. If no response was given, manual follow-up was required. As this animation illustrates, the procure to pay process is complicated, requiring communication between multiple internal stakeholders, GPOs, distributors, and vendors.
Without adequate visibility and insight, the resolution duration was inconsistent. Some match exceptions remained unresolved for more than six months.
The process was highly inefficient, making workload management difficult.
The accounts payable team was reluctant to short-pay invoices—even when the supplier requested them. Without a platform to track the reason for the short pay, related communications, and resolution status, they didn’t have enough visibility to ensure short payments wouldn’t later be questioned as valid by the supplier or jeopardize vendor relationships.
Match exceptions jeopardized the accuracy of Baptist Health’s obligation-to-pay controls because they didn’t have visibility into thousands of resolved match exceptions. There wasn’t a source of truth associated with the communications involved in the resolution.
HealthChain is a Salesforce application that automates match exception resolution. It unifies data across Baptist Health’s technology stack, connecting information with actionable tactics to resolve match exceptions.
It all starts when HealthChain inspects payment and procurement data from the ERP. When it finds price discrepancies between purchase orders and invoices, it immediately starts a standardized process:
The transparent process enables Baptist Health to drive insights, monitor trends, and measure the performance of its systems, suppliers, and team members through data analysis and reporting tools. Process visibility aids in decision-making and strategy optimization.
Additionally, all details related to a match exception are organized in a single Salesforce case, giving full transparency into resolution activities, performance, and duration.
The proof is in Baptist Health’s new metrics.
By implementing HealthChain, Baptist Health improved its match exception resolution process, initially identifying over $2.9 million in invoices at risk of overpayment. Automation led to a faster resolution time, allowing staff to address discrepancies swiftly without the burden of manual tasks. This efficiency resulted in a significant reduction in match exceptions, streamlining operations, enhancing overall financial accuracy, and increasing early payment discount capture. Furthermore, decreased manual work freed up valuable resources and minimized errors, safeguarding strategic vendor relationships.
Baptist Health transformed payment processes, improved revenue recovery, streamlined operational performance, and ensured its physicians had the tools to deliver amazing healthcare experiences for over 1.8 million patients.
90% Reduction in Time-to-Resolution
50% Reduction in Manual Processes
$2.9 Million overcharges resolved