As discussed in our last blog, financial leaders at healthcare organizations face an evolving set of challenges in the form of transparency demands, cybersecurity concerns, and talent challenges. However, as we will discuss below, it is possible to overcome these external threats with the power of people, processes, and technology. Today, we would like to share with you how you can automate, integrate, and mitigate in order to thrive.

How to Take Control of Finance at Your Multi-Entity Healthcare Organization

Internally, professionals at healthcare organizations—whether hospitals, clinics, senior living facilities, or any other healthcare entity—need to take control of their information, address security challenges as they pertain to all data, look for ways to address skills gaps, and work to provide pricing transparency to patients. In short, healthcare organizations need to evolve, rising to the various regulatory, economic, workforce, and technology challenges that exist.

Automate

As mentioned in our previous blog, there is an immense demand for accounting and finance talent in 2017, and healthcare providers face the same challenges as any other entity. With more individuals covered by insurance this means more patients. More patients means more transactions—from purchasing supplies to billing insurers—and there is immense pressure on the accounting and finance teams at healthcare organizations to do more with less.

One of the best ways to address this is to look for opportunities to automate necessary-yet-laborious processes. This automation will allow you to shorten month-end and year-end close processes, roll up multiple entities with ease, and support effective, informed decision making across multiple business lines.

Mitigate

If one thing is clear at healthcare organizations, there are ever-present risks that face healthcare providers from unsavory characters. It’s why 52% of healthcare organizations planned to ramp up security in 2017, per Healthcare IT News.

As finance and accounting leaders at healthcare organizations look to mitigate the risk of cyberattacks and breaches, more and more are looking toward the cloud to qualm their concerns—and with good reason. Companies looking to adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) finance and accounting applications quickly learn that these providers offer better security at lower costs than they would normally be able to afford if they adopted an on-premises solution.

For example, Sage Intacct is committed to making sure your data is safe, taking steps to lock down your data so that the only people who can see it are the ones you want to see it. With redundant Fortune 100-class data centers, granular control, and highly-focused system security measures, you can take solace knowing your data is safe—meeting or exceeding all of the complex regulatory standards affecting financial data at healthcare organizations.

Integrate

By merger, acquisition, or sheer organic growth, healthcare organizations are getting larger. This puts pressure on the finance team to bring a lot of information from a lot of systems together.

If your financial system isn’t connected to your billing, payroll, and other systems, your organization’s accounting and finance workers are probably grappling with data re-entry and inefficient workarounds. Simply put, you can’t afford to be wasting time copying, manipulating, and pasting data between applications.

Whether you’re looking to bring together data from dozens of locations or simply design an ecosystem of applications that works for you, it’s important to find a finance application that can play well with others. Sage Intacct is designed to work with a multitude of applications, letting you design a “suite” of applications that are best suited for your industry and team.

Rising to the Challenge: How Healthcare Organizations Can Evolve Financial Operations.

These are just some of the many challenges that healthcare organizations face now and will face in the future. With the possibility for legislative and regulatory change in coming years, it’s vital to have a system in place that can grow with you, adapt quickly to changes, and allow you to grow.

If you are looking to take the next steps in improving financial operations at your healthcare organization, we invite you to learn more by downloading the Guide to Modern Financial Management and Cloud Accounting for Healthcare Organizations, an in-depth guide on modernizing processes and technology with the cloud. You can get a preview of the guide below, and download the entire guide here.