Heidelberg, April 16, 2009 – tangro PA-HC: SAP add-on for automated processing of payment advices at hospitals
Health insurance companies and healthcare institutions generally settle hospital invoices by collective payments. Before the actual payments are made, the health insurance company notifies the hospital of all outstanding amounts by way of paper-based payment advices. To enable these payment advices to be processed automatically in the SAP system, the University Hospital Heidelberg relies on tangro, a provider of add-ons for automated inbound document processing in SAP. tangro PA-HC (Payment Advice - Health Care), which is an SAP add-on developed specially for day-to-day hospital work processes, saves those in the main book-keeping department a great deal of time when entering payment advice data in the SAP system. tangro PA-HC assigns the separate items of a scanned payment advice automatically to the right customer invoices in SAP. Manual entry of the individual items is no longer necessary. Moreover the application ensures that all inbound payment advices are accounted for and the statutory requirements for health insurances are met. With tangro PA-HC the University Hospital Heidelberg can save time and money, lower the potential for errors and enable real-time liquidity planning by introducing more efficient work processes and reducing delays and throughput times.
Focus on new regulations
New regulations brought in by Book V of the Social Security Code on statutory health insurance (SGB V) have made both the accounting of medical services and the allocation and entry of payment advices far more time-consuming and complex. If tangro PA-HC notices any discrepancies with respect to legal requirements when data are being processed, it responds automatically with a warning message.
University Hospital Heidelberg: top-level medical services and administration
The University Hospital Heidelberg is one of the largest medical centres in Germany. Its primary catchment area is the metropolitan region of Rhein-Neckar. But patients from all over the country and abroad also come here to undergo treatment. In order to treat around 800,000 outpatients and 54,000 inpatients a year, to drive hospital research forward and develop new therapies, the University Hospital together with the Heidelberg University Faculty of Medicine employs some 7,000 staff. These include the people working in the main book-keeping department who look after the incoming payments from patients and health insurance companies for medical services.
Degree of automation of 95 per cent
Before the University Hospital decided to process its payment advices directly in the SAP system with tangro PA-HC, the 20 or so payment advices arriving each day had to be entered in the SAP system manually by the accounting clerks. This made a yearly total of more than 85,000 entries. Not only was the process extremely time-consuming, since almost all the cost units used paper as the data carrier for submitting their payment advices, but matching the incoming payments to the outstanding items was also a lengthy and error-prone business.
"Now the accounting clerks in the main book-keeping department process 95% of the payment advices automatically with the SAP add-on tangro PA-HC”, asserts Heiko Buetschle, head of the accounts receivable and main book-keeping department of the University Hospital Heidelberg. "One of the reasons we opted for tangro PA-HC was that it is integrated directly into the SAP system, so the processing route is short. Another reason was that this SAP add-on solution is tailored precisely to our needs. That meant the training costs were minimal. Our staff responded very positively to the introduction of tangro PA-HC – after all, it lightens their workload and saves them a huge amount of time. We would choose tangro again any day."
"tangro PA-HC cuts costs, saves time and can be operated intuitively as it uses the same SAP environment we are familiar with and doesn't require a feeder system. The SAP system doesn't have to be modified, and interfaces for data import or export, such as the accounts receivable master, aren't needed either", explains Lars Krüger, Sales Director at tangro software components gmbh.
About tangro software components gmbh
tangro software components gmbh is a software development and consultancy firm with headquarters in Heidelberg. Founded in 1998, the company has many years of experience in software development, consulting and project planning. tangro's solutions find application mainly in the industry, banking and insurance and service and trade sectors. tangro supports customers with the optimisation and automation of their business processes for inbound documentation received on paper or electronically via e-mail or EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). The tangro solution uses SAP add-ons as well as solutions and workflow applications outside SAP. The innovative tangro technology is based on graphical business process modelling and guarantees a fast and inexpensive implementation of individual requirements in any current process.
www.tangro.de
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tangro software components gmbh
Lars Krüger
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