Data Integration Challenges Prevalent with Outside Vendors

Today’s revenue cycle increasingly relies on external business partners to process payments. Unfortunately, passing accounts back and forth from the business office to outsourced vendors brings data integration challenges. Often, reconciliation issues occur when the same account is in multiple locations such as with the hospital and the outsourced vendor. This breakdown in inventory integrity raises operating costs, reduces recoveries, and erodes trust among vendors, business office teams and patients.

What Do You Have to Lose (and Gain), a 2018 Waystar white paper, found that an average of 23 percent of accounts across three health systems had some form of account inconsistency. Essentially, 23 in 100 accounts being worked by organizations outside the healthcare system had a data issue. Reconciliation issues include a myriad of problems, including location issues, balance mismatches, and accounts can have mismatches between vendors and hospital patient accounting systems.