The average healthcare organization works with multiple locum tenens staffing agencies, which means they receive numerous invoices from each separate agency for different costs. Tracking and verifying locum tenens billing costs both time and money, especially when done manually. Consolidated billing, along with compliance checks, can make this task easier when done using locum-specific software.
The locum tenens billing challenge
If your organization hires locum tenens providers, it’s likely receiving dozens—or even hundreds—of invoices for their services. Ensuring these invoices are correct and then processing the payments takes a lot of effort.
“Every single invoice you pay as an organization costs money,” says Locumsmart president Thomas Lanvers. “Even if you’re not sending checks anymore and it’s done through ACH, it still costs internal and external dollars. You could have 100 invoices per month, so the complexity is enormous, but there are also hard costs associated with that.”
Additionally, most healthcare organizations don’t have a finance employee dedicated to processing locum tenens invoices, so a staff member must filter them and forward emails to the finance team for payment. The extra step of forwarding numerous invoices, and the time required to explain the locum tenens process to the finance team, can be frustrating and time-consuming.
Gain more insight: How to predict locum tenens usage using data analytics
What is consolidated billing for locum tenens?
Consolidated billing means your locum tenens vendor management system (VMS) automatically does all the work for you, taking the invoices your organization receives from the different locum tenens agencies you work with and combining them into one easy-to-pay bill.
A robust system like Locumsmart will even allow you to customize every setting. So, you can choose how often you want to consolidate bills, how often you want to make a payment, how much you’ll authorize, and whether you want to issue payment manually or automatically.
This means:
- Less administrative work
- One consolidated bill for easy payment
- More timely payments to vendors
- Cost savings
“It’s like saying, ‘Would you rather I send you 50 emails to talk about this one subject, or can I just send you one that concisely tells you exactly what is happening on that subject?’ You’re going to choose one,” explains Jessica Fong, business development manager at Locumsmart. “It essentially involves taking every single vendor invoice and putting it in one easy-to-pay bill.”
Click the image below to download a PDF about consolidated billing:
How to reduce locum billing errors: the compliance check
Consolidated billing sounds great, right? But it’s not enough on its own. One of the most time-consuming parts of the locum tenens invoice payment process is making sure agencies have billed you correctly. Without a compliance check, you could end up paying the wrong amount and having to make costly corrections later.
At the very least, your locum tenens VMS should run all agency invoices through an invoice compliance process that includes the following:
- A review of providers’ timesheets to ensure the hours they bill are categorized correctly
- Confirm travel and lodging expenses are substantiated with receipts
- Ensure providers followed guidelines for including other travel expenses
- Verification of rates, time reported, and expense totals
- Check for duplicate invoices
“A good compliance check weeds out the overbilling before passing it along for review and approval,” says Eric Landstrom, senior director of finance and operations at Locumsmart. “It’s taking work off your plate.”
Click the image below to download a PDF about invoice compliance:
Why is invoice compliance important?
The locums invoice compliance process is an extra layer of assurance in your invoice review. Without a compliance check, a healthcare organization has to go back and verify that they’re being invoiced correctly.
“Our compliance team has saved HCOs $9.4 million over the last 12 months by finding and correcting incorrect invoices,” Fong says. She adds that invoice compliance offers peace of mind when employees reviewing invoices don’t have a background in finance.
“Many different people in an organization might review an invoice—sometimes just for their specialty—and not all of them do it the same way. Some might be really thorough, and others are just going to pass it through and approve it,” she says. “It’s nice to know that it has been checked from a compliance standpoint and meets the compliance check at the bare minimum.”
Learn more about Locumsmart: The most robust VMS solution for locum tenens management
How to choose a healthcare workforce management software
Before you sign up with a locum tenens VMS, make sure it offers both consolidated billing and an invoice compliance check process. It will save you both money and time that can be better spent hiring the providers you need to staff your organization.
Locumsmart’s consolidated billing system allows accounts payable teams to issue one invoice per agency instead of dozens. It also verifies each invoice that comes in against a multi-point checklist to ensure there are no billing errors.
They even work to identify errors before they occur. “Our compliance team has identified trends of rejections and then worked with our vendor account management team to partner with our vendors on best practices to submit invoices so that we catch these problems earlier,” says Garrett Wolfe, business intelligence manager at Locumsmart.
And that’s not all. Locumsmart is currently working on invoicing automation workflows, which will allow HCOs to create even more efficiencies around locum tenens invoicing by automating much of the process.
“We’ve got all the information, we’ve got the rates that are agreed to. We know the schedule, we know the time from the provider when they showed up. Let’s stitch all that together and remove as much labor from the equation as we can,” says Matt Patterson, CTO at Locumsmart. “This will create efficiencies for everyone involved—the agency, Locumsmart staff, and the HCO.”
Locumsmart’s consolidated billing and invoice compliance check can streamline and simplify work for anyone who spends hours managing invoices. Interested in learning more about our locum tenens solution? Contact us today.