Top 5 Reasons Your Healthcare Organization May Need a Physician Timesheet Compliance Solution

Healthcare can often consist of siloed manual or outdated processes, and legacy systems.

While there are many reasons a healthcare organization would benefit from a clinician timesheet and contract compliance tool or a physician timesheet compliance solution, we’ve tried to narrow it down to our Top 5:

Benefits of using Physician Timesheet Compliance Solution

Remove Paper-Based Process

It seems that no matter how much we try to adopt and improve technology systems in the healthcare environment, there are always piles of paperwork on the desks of hospital staff members. Timesheet applications are a dime a dozen, many of them free or inexpensive solutions. And for some organizations, that may be all that’s required. However, for others, it tends to lead to other issues like the monitoring of activity and data in the timesheets, the integration of that data with hospital systems, and the provision of an easy-to-use physician timesheet compliance solution that doesn’t require a lot of training for end users.

Monitor Activity

If timesheets are not submitted in a timely and consistent manner, it could lead to a compliance nightmare. Physicians may need to track down calendar entries and journal logs from previous months, review work completed, and try to find information in the EHR. All of this works just to submit a timesheet at the end of each month.

Compliance professionals may also need to verify the data on timesheets (which can sometimes be illegible or unclear if paper-based processes are still used). This puts pressure on the legal and compliance teams to fact-check activities that are listed on timesheets versus what is specified in the physician contracts.

Better Alignment with Physician Contract Details

The scenario below describes a sequence of events that is all too familiar for medical directors or compliance professionals:

“So, the activities have been completed, and timesheets submitted. Woohoo! We did it!”

“Hmm, but hold on… this one timesheet doesn’t seem quite right. Is this hospitalist allowed to submit for this many clinic hours in a month? Let me find their contract.”

“Wait… where is their contract? Shared drive… [click] [click] [click] … it should be here in one of these sub-folders under the ‘Physician Contracts’ main folder. [click, click, click] Aha, found it!”

“Okay, so now that I have a copy of the contract, let me find the monthly hour limit for this doctor. I believe it should be in Schedule A… or was it in a table format in the previous pages?”

Manual checks of contract details and compliance of timesheet data to contract terms can be exhausting for reviewers, approvers, compliance, and legal teams. A physician timesheet compliance solution can help simplify the lives of healthcare professionals, especially if it has been designed with the end user in mind and automated notifications to take the guesswork out of the equation.

Reduced Risk of Legal and Compliance Issues

From a Dallas-based healthcare organization having to pay $4.7M to settle kickback allegations to a California surgeon being convicted in a 4-year billing fraud scheme, the repercussions of not having physician timesheets and ignoring compliance requirements are immense. There has to be a better way. You may be interested in reading about the real costs of non-compliance in healthcare. 

More Efficient Payment Processing

As a physician, you may not know whose desk your timesheet is sitting on once you have submitted it.

After speaking with many physicians from across the country, we hear questions like this after timesheets are manually submitted:

• Has the information been reviewed and approved?
• When can I expect payment for services completed last month?

For finance teams, there may often be discrepancies between the information you receive after reviewing completed timesheets and the actual approvals that went through.

• Were all the activities accounted for?
• Are any of these activities still under review?
• Should the finance team process payments for the entire monthly timesheet submission or just specific completed activities?

A healthcare-focused timesheet management system should provide physicians with transparency into the approval process of their timesheets, and give finance teams the ability to quickly process payments knowing that they have gone through the necessary checks and balances. Read about how technology can help centralize healthcare provider financial operations

Although there are plenty of reasons for a hospital to find a suitable timesheet management software, an easy-to-use healthcare-focused physician timesheet compliance solution designed by clinicians is not always the easiest thing to find. Often healthcare organizations are required to go through rigorous evaluation of new software, which can often take months. To help make it a bit easier for hospitals, TimeSmart.AI has put together an evaluation checklist of items that your organization should look for during the evaluation process.

Email us at info@timesmart.ai for more information about our physician timesheet compliance solution and a copy of the evaluation checklist.