Telecom Expense Management in Healthcare

Telecom Expense Management in Healthcare: Implementing Best Practices – Case Study

Implementing best practices in utility and telecom expense management in healthcare organizations enables them to contend better with increasing costs, decreasing revenues, new regulations such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), as well as the continuing widespread adoption of work from home (i.e. liability issues related to personal information protection). As a result, these organizations can exert greater control over their accounts payable.

As a BPO specialist, RadiusPoint was commissioned by a healthcare organization with 275 locations nationwide to implement a new TEM process using the Expense Logic SAAS platform. As a result, RadiusPoint and its client have achieved:

• An ROI of 448% in just 6 months of service
• 6-digit savings over the next few years as telecom expense are not managed manually anymore

Challenge

The healthcare industry is undergoing a rapid transformation. Healthcare organizations have unique needs for mission critical services and security in all reporting transactions. At the same time, the utilization of mobile technology is rapidly expanding. Smartphones, tablets, and mobile apps are being deployed to streamline processes such as patient registration and discharge, diagnostics, and inter-hospital communications. The combination of these trends makes it more challenging than ever for healthcare telecom and IT departments to accomplish their goals and effectively adapt to a rapidly changing environment.

RadiusPoint was brought on board to assist a healthcare organization with 275 locations nationwide. They were experiencing 3 issues that are all too commonly observed in TEM:

Decentralized spending caused by employees purchasing mobile and IT equipment as needed
Inaccurate inventory of telecom and IT services and each location and for each employee
Late fees triggered by non-systematic invoice management practices

Process

RadiusPoint quickly discovered our client had no standards for ordering telecom and IT services, as each employee was allowed to order any type of mobile or IT equipment deemed necessary for their location. This eliminated any cost savings that could be created using global contracts or economies of scale.

This also created issues with the telecom and IT inventory since no Help Desk tool was used for corporate-wide online ordering of services and equipment.

RadiusPoint analytical work also highlighted thousands of dollar worth of late fees each month due to mismanagement of telecom invoices, as well as regular disruptions in intermittent disconnections of services causing work disruptions at each location. Each location received a telecom invoice, the location approved the invoice and sent it to corporate for payment for bill payment and invoice management tasks.

Management of services and invoices became unmanageable for the client’s Corporate Telecom department, resulting in high lag time past dues fees and some service disconnects.

Solution

Implementing best practices in telecom expense management in healthcare organizations enables them to reduce costs by providing a new level of visibility into their entire communications environment and the lifecycle of their invoices. Everything telecom is tracked in a centralized repository, while reporting tools provide accurate assessments of costs, help track and dispute billing errors, contract management form contract image and auditing, and discover opportunities for optimization. Capacity planning and call accounting capabilities help ensure network resources aren’t wasted.

This goes beyond just telecom. A good TEM vendor will provide a comprehensive management strategy that includes both telecom and IT, managing the complete communications lifecycle. The accuracy behind these transactions is vital to the overall efficacy of the organization.

In order to help our client, RadiusPoint first centralized the invoices to allow for timely receipt of the invoices while still giving each location that decentralized feel due to complete visibility of the invoices with digitalized document management.

Additionally, RadiusPoint leveraged its proprietary SAAS platform ExpenseLogic, to create a concise list of invoices and services. This list allowed the client’s Corporate Telecom department to identify readily which services were utilized at each location and to cut costs for unnecessary services. This reporting also allowed the organization to identify areas where services and equipment could be upgraded or altered to create savings.

Results

Implementing best practices in telecom expense management in healthcare organizations will yield significant time and monetary savings for the latter. RadiusPoint’s work with the Facilities and the Corporate Telecom department generated a significant ROI of 448% in just 6 months of service.

Additionally, RadiusPoint identified and received almost $19,000 in refunds for the client, which went directly to the organization’s bottom line.

Lastly, this healthcare organization was able to reallocate 2 FTE’s due to the business process services provided by the RadiusPoint team that resulted thousands of dollars in hard dollar cost savings immediately, and 7-digit future savings in terms of man hours not spent as telecom expense are not managed manually anymore.

TEM, BPO and the bottom line

Many factors are involved in the implementation of best practices for telecom expense management in healthcare. Manual tasks affect their human resources’ capacity to manage the services and expenses vital to day-to-day healthcare operations. Healthcare organizations turn to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to alleviate some of these labor-intensive, redundant tasks. Business process outsourcing enables an organization to turn over business processes to an external provider that, in turn, partners with the organization to own, administrate, and manage these processes. Performance is measured by defined and measurable metrics.

RadiusPoint is a business process outsource provider that utilizes ExpenseLogic, a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. Reducing costs, increasing productivity and delivering predictable, reliable results through the implementation of best practices in telecom expense management in healthcare allows our clients to reduce the workload of their Accounts Payable, Telecom, IT and Utility/Energy departments, while reducing service costs.

Balancing market forces with ever-changing government regulations is a daunting challenge. When healthcare organizations try to manage their telecom vendor services through labor-intensive, error-prone manual processes, they are less able to generate value through their core services.

RadiusPoint’s core services include Telecom Expense Management (TEM), Managed Mobility Services (MMS) and Utility Expense Management (UEM). Our core services give our clients a complete synergistic solution to manage each service successfully. RadiusPoint expertly optimizes your enterprise technology environment – from procurement to payment — by providing monthly invoice processing services utilizing the business intelligence generated by our SaaS platform ExpenseLogic.

Creating a positive return on investment (ROI) is the RadiusPoint team’s focus while providing the billing and invoice information that the Accounts Payable, Telecom, and IT departments need to create that true digital transformation. Our SaaS platform offers a way to implement best practices in telecom expense management in healthcare organizations, and to generate a positive ROI in doing so. In this case, a 448% ROI in the first 6 months of our BPO services partnership.

Additional resources:

RadiusPoint: TEM specialist for over 30 years
Peer-to-peer reviews on RadiusPoint TEM services published by Gartner