Healthcare provider speeds up invoicing and supports agile working with Quadient Impress
Through a network of hospitals, fitness and wellbeing centres, medical centres and workplace wellbeing facilities, this healthcare provider offers physical and mental health services. In addition to seeing and treating patients itself, it also offers other consultants use of its rooms for appointments. In 2023, the billing team that invoices for this service transformed its manual processes with Quadient Impress to be more efficient, resulting in payments coming in sooner and supporting agile working.
The challenge: to improve invoicing efficiency
The healthcare provider’s billing team is dispersed across the UK and all team members work from home. To complete the monthly task of sending out invoices, two members of the team would spend three days in the office printing, folding and putting invoices into envelopes, running the mail through the franking machine to add postage and send it to post.
This monthly stint in the office was inconvenient and took employees away from their other billing duties. What’s more, if a consultant requested a copy of an invoice, it was inefficient for a biller to go to the office to retrieve just one item of mail. Instead, the team would rely on office-based colleagues to help, which was inconvenient for those employees.
The process was not ideal from a cashflow perspective either. Invoices were issued as a batch on an assigned day of the month. This could be some weeks after the service was provided. If the team could issue invoices with more immediacy, money could flow back into the organisation sooner.
This delay also meant invoices sometimes arrived after payment had been received from direct debit payers. This created a secondary process to rectify any issues, such as issuing credits or processing refunds.
Moreover, many consultants prefer to receive their invoices by email, rather than post, but the process was not set up to do this. The ideal customer experience would offer a choice of electronic or paper-based invoicing.
The healthcare provider’s revenue team lead, financial services, felt there must be a way to serve customers better using technology, whilst at the same time supporting agile working: “I think that is an overall strategy – to make everything more streamlined and accessible,” they say. “Also, there is an ambition to be carbon neutral - obviously emailing invoices is going to contribute to that as well.”
The process: a bespoke build and dedicated project management
As an existing customer of Quadient’s mail management equipment, the healthcare provider approached Quadient for advice.
Quadient recommended an outbound document management system. The solution would be a bespoke build and Quadient would need to work with the customer’s two back-office billing platforms to implement it.
“We had a demo,” explains the customer. “And quite a lot of questions, but the Quadient team was very patient.”
Working with invoicing, Quadient input the required particulars for the data fields, created workflows and produced invoice templates, taking the opportunity for some standardising, as the different hospitals used different layouts.
Once the build was complete, the invoicing team got hands-on. “We were greatly supported during the testing phase,” the customer adds. “We needed to make sure we’d covered all eventualities, but the Quadient team was always on hand if we needed something.”
End to end project management was essential to the success. Quadient held weekly, sometimes twice weekly, calls with the customer’s team, who also engaged the expertise of Quadient
professional services.
When it came to training staff, Quadient recorded the sessions to share them with other employees within the customer’s organisation. One employee says: “The sessions were really good and informative. They gave us confidence that we knew what we were doing.”
The solution: Quadient Impress
After a phased rollout, the new invoicing process through Quadient Impress was fully up and running by February 2024.
Quadient Impress is a comprehensive outbound document management platform that automates communications workflows and enhances flexibility through options to print documents to post or send electronically.
Quadient Impress Automate handles document composition while Quadient Impress Distribute prints, sorts, inserts the invoices into envelopes, adds postage and submits items into the postal system.
The focus, in applying the solution in this use case, was on reducing touchpoints and a practical process that would get invoices out faster. Quadient configured the solution so that invoices email automatically, if an email address exists for the consultant, and sends to print if not.
“Our trust built very quickly when we saw what Quadient Impress was capable of,” says the customer. “I’m a real advocate of the system – it has made a significant improvement to our team’s way of working.”
The result: Faster and more efficient invoicing
The customer’s billing team now processes its invoices for room use through Quadient Impress across most of its hospitals. This has meant invoices can be issued faster and therefore money can flow back into the organisation sooner.
“Faster invoice delivery and payment, and working more efficiently are the main benefits,” says the customer. “We can literally get confirmation from a site in the morning and within an hour or two the invoice can be in the consultant’s email inbox.
“Also, it has eliminated the need for a task that was onerous. It wasn’t very enriching for team members - folding bits of paper and putting them in envelopes. Now that resource can be used for tasks that add value.”
The more sustainable process has also delivered on the goal to issue fewer paper-based invoices. The majority of consultants choose email delivery and for those that are sent paper copies, the process has a stage built in whereby the team can double-check if they too would prefer to switch to email.
Quadient Impress supports an agile workforce with billing staff no longer required to attend the office for monthly invoicing. Also, if a consultant needs a copy of their invoice, it is now easy, and as quick, to send as the original.
The digital platform equips the team with detailed insight into the invoicing process and schedule, so employees can better manage any failures and clearly see if an invoice has been issued and paid. If there are any disputes, it is simple for the team to provide proof to credit control of when and how the invoice was sent.
