Healthcare organizations face a unique set of challenges when it comes to managing accounts payable (AP).
Unlike other industries, the combination of massive invoice volume, complex purchasing structures, and the critical need for speed makes healthcare AP especially difficult to manage. And that’s even more so the case when relying on manual processes or multi-tools.
At a time when financial sustainability is under pressure due to workforce shortages and volatile supply chains, automating AP with purpose-built solutions can make all the difference.
Below, we break down three pain points that make healthcare AP so unique and why a dedicated tool is the best way forward.
1. Decentralized Invoice Processing Slows Everything Down
In healthcare, invoice routing is often anything but centralized. A department like oncology might place an order, receive the invoice directly, handwrite a GL code and sign-off on it, then send it to accounts payable through interoffice mail. Or worse, delay sending it for days or even weeks.
As a result of this process, the AP department may not see that invoice until the due date is looming or has already passed. This delay means prompt pay discounts are routinely missed, forcing the organization to forgo savings that could have added up significantly over time.
To make matters worse, healthcare approval workflows remain paper-based or ad-hoc, which introduces bottlenecks and increases the likelihood of human error.
The result? Emergency payment runs become the norm, not the exception. Compounding the issue, teams have little visibility into invoice statuses across departments, making it difficult to monitor progress, catch issues early, or ensure accountability.
2. Fragmented Communication Between AP, Purchasing, & Vendors
Another defining challenge in healthcare AP is the fragmented nature of communication between critical stakeholders… namely, accounts payable, purchasing, and vendors.
These groups often work in silos, with no shared process for resolving discrepancies. For example, a buyer may create a purchase order for 100 items at $10 each, but the vendor later sends an invoice for the same quantity at $12 apiece.
When this lands on the AP team’s desk, they’re left to guess which amount is correct. And that means a back-and-forth email chain that can take days to resolve.
Healthcare accounts payable teams need a unified system to resolve discrepancies quickly, reduce overpayments, and maintain vendor trust.
The lack of real-time visibility and alignment between AP and purchasing, otherwise, leads to frequent delays, strained supplier relationships, and unnecessary costs.
3. EDI is Powerful in Healthcare, But Also Painfully Complex
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a cornerstone of healthcare purchasing because of the industry’s sheer scale and complexity.
Hospitals and health systems often manage thousands of line items from dozens of vendors, and EDI helps streamline the flow of purchase orders, receipts, and invoices. But for all its potential, EDI is notoriously difficult to manage without the right tools.
Vendors often use specific EDI fields differently, which means mapping incoming files correctly requires constant maintenance or vendor specific mapping. Seemingly simple mismatches, like receiving a record for “10 boxes” when the system expects “10 cases,” can break the match and require manual correction.
Managing these issues often demands vigilant oversight, and without a system that understands healthcare-specific nuance, organizations risk constant disruption.
In healthcare, these challenges are amplified by the concentration of spend with large, national vendors such as Medline, Cardinal Health, Owens & Minor, and Baxter.
Each of these suppliers may structure their EDI 810 invoices slightly differently, apply allowances and rebates in unique ways, or change field usage as their own systems evolve. And staying in tune with these vendor-specific patterns is critical.
That’s why healthcare accounts payable teams need automation that can simplify EDI management, ensure accurate data matching, and maintain three-way match integrity at scale. Without this type of intelligent automation and centralized control, healthcare organizations face constant processing delays and unnecessary costs.
Purpose-Built Solutions Built for Healthcare AP
The challenges healthcare accounts payable teams face is complicated so much so that to solve them, a purpose-built solution is warranted. Because of the many nuances, there’s a lot that teams need to get right and feel confident about.
That’s where RPI’s Yoga Flexible Software comes into play. The solution was designed with these exact pain points in mind. It’s not a Swiss armory knife automation platform repackaged for healthcare, but rather a purpose-built AP automation solution that understands the realities of decentralized, fast-paced healthcare environments.
Here’s what Yoga delivers:
- Centralized invoice intake: All invoices flow into a single inbox. Email, EDI, scanned, or manually entered and then routed automatically.
- Smart OCR: Yoga reads hand-written notes, understands healthcare-specific formatting, and is configured to each client. No generic out-of-the-box limitations.
- Built-in collaboration tools: Yoga allows teams to communicate with buyers, suppliers, and approvers directly within the application. Live data visibility reduces back-and-forth and prevents errors.
- Customer service agent: Yoga’s Customer Service Agent utilizes AI to answer common questions from vendors around payment inquiries and help route payment update information to the right person
- EDI simplified: Yoga handles flat-file ingestion, record creation, and data reconciliation automatically, with no daily oversight required.
- Prompt pay enablement: With faster processing and ACH capabilities, Yoga helps clients earn vendor discounts routinely as well as reduce paper check usage.
- Managed vendor rules: Yoga deploys AI to assist in building deterministic rules that adapt to vendor-specific behaviors. Unlike “black box” AI models that obscure decision-making, these rules remain auditable, transparent, and fully traceable, allowing finance teams to see why an automation took place, as well as alter it if necessary.
In short, Yoga brings healthcare AP out of the manual, fragmented past and into a streamlined, intelligent future.
The Future of Healthcare AP Belongs to Purpose-Built Automation
Healthcare accounts payable needs automation built for its world. Generic tools can’t keep up with physician preference items, supply substitutions, shifting contract pricing, or EDI quirks from major distributors.
Layer in decentralized purchasing, fragmented communication between finance and supply chain, and strict compliance demands, and it’s clear why healthcare AP requires tailored, transparent automation.
Backed by over 20 years of development, Yoga Flexible Software was designed from the ground up to meet the complexities of healthcare head-on. If your healthcare accounts payable team is ready to eliminate manual processes, it’s time to rethink your tools.
Don’t take our word for it though. Find out how Yoga helped Cooper Health Care University achieve a 70% touchless invoice processing rate, and a 98% EDI processing rate in the case study below.
Frequently Asked Questions About Healthcare Accounts Payable
1. What makes healthcare accounts payable different from other industries?
Healthcare organizations process an exceptionally high volume of invoices, often across fragmented departments like nursing and physician practices.
Unlike other industries, approvals can be handwritten or delayed, and having to reconcile against complex vendor contracts and group purchasing agreements alongside strict compliance requirements add further complexity. These factors make manual or generic AP tools especially ineffective in healthcare.
2. How can automation improve healthcare accounts payable processes?
In healthcare, automation unifies invoice intake across EDI, paper, and electronic formats, normalizes vendor quirks, and enforces contract pricing and three-way match rules tied to group purchasing agreements. It also bridges communication gaps between finance and supply chain, resolving issues like substitutions, pricing, or freight directly in the workflow.
For healthcare teams this means faster cycle times, fewer compliance risks, and reliable capture of prompt-pay discounts, which are capabilities only purpose-built tools like Yoga Flexible Software can deliver.
3. Why is EDI such a challenge in healthcare accounts payable?
EDI is essential for handling the massive scale of purchasing in healthcare, but every vendor uses EDI fields differently.
Without intelligent automation, mismatches and exceptions require constant manual oversight. Purpose-built AP automation solutions such as Yoga simplify EDI management, interpret healthcare-specific data, and maintain three-way match integrity at scale.
