3 Ways Technology Can Help Centralize Healthcare Provider Financial Operations

The administration of provider and clinical compensation is very complex for several reasons such as compliance, regulatory requirements, recruitment challenges, evolving healthcare delivery models, and the unique nature of most provider contracts. Due to the complexity and various stakeholders involved in contract management, physician time tracking, manually reviewing, and approving physician compensation can take days, sometimes months. 

Centralizing provider financial operations is crucial for streamlining processes, improving efficiency, and ensuring compliance. Technology like AI-driven physician compensation solutions play a pivotal role in achieving this goal by giving physicians, reviewers, and approvals more transparency, generating time and cost-saving efficiencies, and consistency. 

Centralize Healthcare Provider Financial Operations: 3 Effective Tech-Driven Approaches

With emerging technologies like AI already shaping the future of healthcare, let’s examine the three ways technology can help with the centralization of healthcare provider financial operations:

Simplify Contract Management

Cloud-based AI-driven solutions offer a centralized repository for managing physician and clinical contracts. It also helps eliminate information silos, improve accessibility, and enhance collaboration among the various stakeholders such as physician compensation, Chief Medical Officers, legal, finance, and compliance teams. These systems digitally store the contracts and the contract metadata for fast and convenient lookups. Additionally, they streamline workflows by automating repetitive tasks such as verifying services delivered are in alignment with timesheets submitted, and processing payment approvals.

Digital dashboards highlight the number of active contracts, contracts that are in draft, and upcoming contract renewals for real-time visibility. Additionally, they provide insights into contract expiry dates and renewal workflows. This makes it easier to digitally track payments with evidence of compliance and alert stakeholders to upcoming renewal deadlines and other important reminders. By leveraging AI for contract management, healthcare organizations can enhance transparency, improve operational efficiency, and reduce legal and regulatory exposure.

Download: Free Physician Contract Management Policy Template

Automate Physician Timesheet Submission and Review

Role-based AI-driven healthcare timesheet solutions allow physicians to digitally complete and submit timesheets, eliminating the need for paper-based submissions. In tandem with this, it enables department heads or Chief Medical Officers to review and approve timesheets and gives finance and system admins real-time visibility into the contract terms to align the services delivered with contractual obligations. This helps avoid under or overpayment in compliance with the laws and regulations that govern physician contracts.

These solutions streamline workflows by automating repetitive tasks, such as verifying contracts, services delivered, timesheets, performance productivity, and approval processing. This reduces administrative overhead by more than 50% and provides instant visibility into the entire timesheet review process for physicians and administrators. By automating the process, administrators can easily identify bottlenecks, and optimize the provider compensation process across the organization.

Greater Access to Data and Analytics

Leveraging data and analytics permits healthcare organizations to gain actionable insights into their financial performance and operational efficiency. Access to data such as physician spend enables organizations to make strategic data-driven decisions. AI-driven solutions make it faster and easier to identify key contract terms when reviewing and approving physician timesheets, as they can analyze and parse through contracts to identify relevant information to ensure payments are in alignment with evidence of contract compliance.

By automating this process, healthcare organizations can significantly reduce the time and effort required for teams to manually find and compare contract terms with timesheets submitted and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Additionally, AI can flag potential contract and/or timesheet deficiencies for further review by compensation, compliance, and legal teams. Aggregating and analyzing data enables healthcare administrators to identify potential payment delays or denials, performance gaps, trends, patterns, and opportunities for cost savings and revenue optimization.

Deploying an automated provider compensation solution like TimeSmart.AI empowers healthcare compensation executives, compliance officers, and finance and legal teams to centralize their financial operations effectively, streamline processes, gain more spending transparency, and achieve greater efficiency.  As hospitals and health systems transition to a more centralized model, they can streamline physician payment processes, reduce administrative overhead, improve satisfaction among physicians to attract and retain top-tier physicians and enjoy the multiple benefits of enhanced operational efficiencies, while also ensuring accuracy and compliance. 

Furthermore, AI-driven physician payment solutions can better equip physicians and healthcare organizations to focus on delivering high-quality patient care while simultaneously optimizing financial performance and regulatory compliance.

Watch this two-minute video to find out how TimeSmart.AI can deliver an 80% decrease in your operational costs by digitally transforming your contract management and physician compensation processes.