From falling behind to peace of mind: A healthcare system’s journey to automated reconciliation

Crowe applied a three-phase approach to working with this client, with weekly status meetings and identification of potential risks throughout the engagement. With decades of healthcare experience, our specialists were able to dive deep into the organization’s processes and perform an end-to-end examination to identify opportunities for improvement.

First, our healthcare specialists performed an analysis of the client’s approach to reconciliation. This analysis helped to find possible process gaps and to understand how to make the Crowe Automated Reconciliation for healthcare solution work best within the client’s existing processes.

We also looked at the organization’s unapplied cash-balance data over a three-month period to determine the extent of the problem at that point in time. Specifically, the client was concerned about fluctuations in its accounts.

The biggest issue we discovered in our investigation was a communication breakdown between two of the client’s key teams: finance and revenue cycle. Specifically, a lack of understanding existed on the part of both the revenue cycle and finance teams about how each other’s activities affected the overall unapplied cash general ledger (GL) balance. These two groups weren’t meeting regularly to figure out fluctuations within the unapplied cash balance, and neither knew what information the other needed or why.

In the second stage, we implemented Crowe Automated Reconciliation for healthcare, our industry-specific technology that replaces manual unapplied cash GL account reconciliation processes with an automated process. This solution automates the cash and unapplied cash reconciliation process by performing a daily, three-way match between the general ledger, patient accounting system, and the bank. That automation ultimately improves the accuracy of the balance sheet and financial disclosures.

We also encouraged the client to open up and enhance the communication between its finance and revenue cycle teams in the interest of understanding each other’s priorities and terminology. The client agreed and, all told, this implementation phase took less than three months.

Once the Crowe Automated Reconciliation for healthcare solution was implemented and process changes were formalized and put in place, we spent the next few months running parallel processes to monitor the setup and use of the tool. We ran these processes to verify that the client was getting the data it needed to stay on top of the reconciliation – and to avoid falling behind or running into unexpected fluctuations.