The challenge: Improve turnaround time and reduce rejected invoices
Our client, a private-equity owned healthcare business and data automation company, is on a mission to create an operationally efficient healthcare supply chain. Its technology-based platforms, analytics and solutions, bring industry players together, increasing efficiency and driving down costs across the supply chain.
The client helps 36 hospitals across the US to efficiently process invoices, enabling full visibility and ensuring rigorous contract compliance. Every month, the client receives nearly 150,000 invoices from over 10,000 suppliers. Its on-demand invoice processing solution automates various aspects of the invoice process, including invoice receipt, document image and data capture, and workflow management, leading to lower costs, improved efficiencies, and faster processing. But two major roadblocks were hampering the efficiency of the automated solution.
- Roadblock #1: It took the client nearly a week to receive rejected invoices data (about 2% of the total volume). The reason: the rejected invoices had to be manually scanned and then physically shipped back to the hospitals after data capture.
- Roadblock # 2: At one time, the number of invoices rejected due to the presence of PHI information on the invoice, shot up to about 3% of overall rejects due to instruction changes – from just 0.4% earlier.
The client needed support in improving turnaround time of rejected invoices and reduce percentage of rejected invoices containing Protected Health Information (PHI)
The solution: Automated data extraction and exception handling workflows
Firstsource leveraged its proprietary workflow platform Sympraxis which streamlines business processes with intelligent workflows.To address the first roadblock of reducing TAT of receiving rejected invoices, our team automated data extraction through proprietary workflow and case management tool and minimized manual intervention. Sympraxis leverages an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) rules engine which was deployed to accurately extract relevant information and convert them into an electronic format. The electronic invoices were then emailed to the client instantly.
To tackle the second roadblock of reducing the number of rejected invoices, the OCR engine of Sympraxis automatically identified invoices containing PHI using PHI-related keywords and sent them to the different workflow for PHI redaction and further processing.
The result: Streamlined processes delivering impact on all counts
The workflow management and automation not only significantly reduced the turnaround time of rejected invoices from one week to 24 hours, but also eliminated the shipping costs associated with mailing the rejected invoices back to the client. Redacting all PHI-related invoices with 100% accuracy resulted in Zero PHI-related rejects exceeding the client expectations.
