Safeguarding Health Care from Financial Threats
Mohawk Medbuy’s AP system has detected and eliminated half a billion dollars of duplicate invoices sent to hospitals.
For hospitals and health care organizations, a great deal goes on behind the scenes that contributes to the delivery of quality care. Back office functions, such as Accounts Payable (AP), are constantly looking for ways to become more financially nimble. The objective is to pay vendors, suppliers and other partners more efficiently while adhering to regulations, minimizing errors and protecting the organization against fraud exposure.
Mohawk Medbuy’s Accounts Payable Services provide large, medium and small health care organizations with a centralized, automated platform for streamlined, cost-effective invoice capture, processing and payment. The not-for-profit, shared services organization’s AP offering features robust system, IT and business controls, including automated segregation of duties to secure its processes. It also has advanced analytics to optimize AP-related cash management. That sophistication is essential to process more than 300,000 invoices ($1.8+ billion) each year for hospitals – and generate half a million dollars of bottom-line savings for them through early payment discounts, e-invoicing and process efficiencies.
The shift from paper-based AP systems to Mohawk Medbuy’s automated process is a welcome change for hospitals, giving them greater visibility into the payment process and immediate access to invoice data. It has also eliminated the input errors of manual entry, labour-intensive invoice/PO matching and delays – not to mention the space requirements of document storage. With COVID-19 requiring more and more people to work remotely, a fully digital AP platform has become essential.
Without sophisticated system checks, hospitals leave themselves vulnerable to fraud. Mohawk Medbuy’s Accounts Payable solution uses automated controls to ensure a three-way match of all Purchase Order (PO) invoices and strictly adheres to hospital invoice approval policies. POs are electronically checked against the receipt and the invoice. Physical invoices are entered using advanced scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for consistent, accurate data capture. Any suspected duplicate invoices are instantly identified and flagged for removal – minimizing manual intervention and the potential of fraud from falsified orders or invoices.
“Inadvertently or purposefully, suppliers can send the same invoice multiple times, which creates duplicates,” said Ryan Martens, Director of Accounts Payable Services at Mohawk Medbuy. “Our system streamlines the identification of these duplicates and uses AI and data analytics to run additional investigative scenarios that flag possible duplication. With hundreds or thousands of multiple invoices flowing into an organization, there’s no room for error.”
The emergence of coronavirus strained all facets of health care. However, throughout the pandemic, Mohawk Medbuy’s AP Centre has maintained full service levels critical to its Member hospitals, including the coordination of payments to secure essential PPE.
The COVID environment posed additional risk to AP processes, according to Martens. “With so many new suppliers of PPE and cyber criminals using the pandemic as a gateway, we’re being even more vigilant,” he said. “That includes following up with vendors directly, confering with hospital contacts – whatever is required. And as an AP team, we have regular huddles so everyone is aware of the latest threat dynamics.
As the health care industry evolves, Mohawk Medbuy’s Accounts Payable Service will continue to collaborate with health care providers and suppliers to bring new safeguards to the P2P process, as well as efficiencies that free up funds to support better patient care.