Spend Management Software

Today’s hospitals must process invoices, expenses, and payments from a growing number of diverse sources. Even for a small healthcare center, manually managing expenses can quickly get out of control. Spend management software can simplify and automate processes so your team has more time to focus on running the hospital.

What Is Spend Management Software?

Spend management software includes a broad range of software solutions. In general, these tools help you accomplish tasks like:

• Tracking expenses
• Generating invoices
• Setting spending limits on specific items and services
• Flagging missed and late payments
• Analyzing spending data to identify trends
• Creating and enforcing policies

Hospital Spend Management Software

Within a hospital, you might need spend management software specifically designed for a healthcare facility. These tools should have features that address needs like:

• Following contracts with suppliers
• Comparing vendor costs
• Tracking and comparing expenses between departments
• Finding opportunities to lower costs while improving patient outcomes

Spend management shouldn’t prevent your employees from giving patients excellent care. Instead, it should help you discover ways to lower costs while exceeding expectations. While other facilities struggle to keep their services affordable, you can offer people a reliable place to receive the services they need to lead healthy lives.

Spend management software should also offer the flexibility you need to oversee a hospital and its many departments. Some of your departments will need the same items, such as gauze, thermometers, and cleaning supplies. Others will need more niche items that are only used within specific contexts. For example, your oncology department might not need to buy replacement parts for MRI machines because your imaging department would handle the job.

Ideally, your software should have a dashboard that helps you organize spending so you can review it in ways that meet your evolving needs. One day, you might want to review a certain department’s spend. The next day, you might need to review the entire hospital’s spend. The best software can do both easily.

Importance and Advantage of Spend Management Software

Hospital administrators shouldn’t underestimate how business spend management software can improve hospital processes while controlling costs. Without spend management tools, you will likely lose control of your hospital’s expenses and budget. Imagine trying to track every expense manually. Even the most detail-oriented person would eventually make a mistake. A reliable spend management platform minimizes that risk to give you an accurate account of your facility’s spending.

The advantages of your spend management software will depend on the features it gives you. Ideally, you can find a tool that does all of the following:

• Allows budgeting for individual departments and projects as well as the entire facility
• Integrates with your other software, including accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions
• Analyzes data and predicts emerging trends so you can prepare for future expenses
• Enforces policy compliance
• Approves workflows without much administrative oversight
• Generates reports you can share with colleagues, department heads, and stakeholders
• Keeps a detailed account of audit trails to ensure transparency and accountability
• Lets you manage vendors by tracking performance and managing contracts
• Establish benchmarks so you can compare real-world spending with expectations

Are There Disadvantages to Using Spend Management Software?

As budgets and invoices become increasingly complicated, healthcare facilities will need to adopt spend management software they can trust. The biggest threat to your organization is choosing a spend management solution that doesn’t do its job well.

What could go wrong with poorly made software? Critically, it could open your organization to cybersecurity threats. Healthcare facilities have become popular ransomware targets because criminals know hospitals rely on digital records. Losing data could mean that thousands or even millions of people don’t get the services they deserve.

Before investing in any software solution, make sure it meets your industry’s security requirements and guidelines. Failing to do so could have dire consequences.

Healthcare Spend Management Software

While general spend management software can potentially help all types of organizations maximize their budgets, it often makes sense to choose industry-specific spend management software.

Industry-specific spend management software should include features that address your industry’s unique requirements. For example, the best legal spend management software might have features that account for billed hours, expert witnesses, and research. Reliable IT spend management software, however, might have built-in options for recurring SaaS fees, service maintenance, and training courses.

Healthcare spend management software will share many features with solutions developed with other industries in mind. However, it should also have features specific to healthcare facilities.

HIPAA Compliance

Perhaps most importantly, your healthcare spend management software should comply with HIPAA’s security requirements. Even if you don’t have any patient records directly connected to your spend management software, you should comply with HIPAA guidelines. Keep in mind that a security flaw in one piece of software could open the door to other parts of your IT ecosystem.

Decision Frameworks

Your software could also provide decision frameworks that help you choose the most effective vendors and purchasing strategies. Every decision has benefits and disadvantages. Decision frameworks give stakeholders all of the information they need, including pros and cons, to maximize their budgets and improve patient outcomes.

Budget Caps

Budget caps make it easier for healthcare systems to control their spending. Some healthcare administrators argue that departments and projects shouldn’t have hard budget caps that no one can ever exceed. Instead, employees and managers should have access to a process that approves spending above their budget caps. This approach controls spending while including the flexibility medical professionals need in real-world situations.

Additionally, some software developers will work with your organization to add features specific to your needs. That way, you can streamline processes without rewriting all of your policies.

Evaluation of Different Vendor Options

Plenty of spend management software vendors would love to have your business. How can you compare spend management software companies to choose the right option for your hospital?

There are several topics to consider while you search for the top spend management software.

Does the Spend Management Software Vendor Have a Healthcare Solution?

Although generic spend management software could help your hospital, you’ll get more effective features from a solution developed with your industry in mind.

Several companies say that they can customize their platforms to match the healthcare industry’s needs. But they say that about a lot of industries. You have to wonder whether they have someone on staff who truly understands the spend management features a hospital needs.

Valify specializes in healthcare purchased services analytics and benchmarking. When you adopt it, you know you get a solution developed specifically for healthcare professionals.

Does the Solution Offer Custom Contracting for Fragmented Services?

Your hospital probably relies on third-party service providers to perform numerous tasks. You might have some contractors mixed in with your in-house team. You might also outsource services related to:

• Finances
• IT
• Human resources
• Telecommunications
• Insurance
• Housekeeping

Outsourcing these and other services often means you can have professionals handle tasks without adding more people to your payroll.

Unfortunately, some low-visibility services slip through the cracks. A superior spend management solution will help you discover these services so you can compare your options and make informed choices. You might learn that you can save a lot of money just by switching to a different service provider.

Can You Get a Free Trial or Demo?

Realistically, you can’t know whether a piece of software works well for you until you see it in action. Valify provides a free demo so you can witness how its features will benefit your healthcare organization.

Emerging Trends in Spend Management Software Market

Spend management software needs to keep up with emerging trends just like other tech-driven tools do. What can you expect to see in the near future of cloud spend management software?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could revolutionize SaaS spend management software. It’s impossible for humans to review every data point. These technologies, however, thrive when working with big datasets.

By embracing ML and AI, hospitals could find connections between data that helps them maximize their budgets and patient outcomes. A piece of information might seem irrelevant to you, but AI can scrutinize it to determine its actual relevance.

Integrations With Supply Chain Management Systems

Expect to see spend management software come with more built-in integrations that can connect to diverse supply chain management systems. Connecting these two software solutions provides exceptional control over all aspects of spending and controlling inventory.

More Industry-Specific Software Options

As more organizations discover the benefits of using spend management software, expect to see more companies release solutions that address industry-specific needs. When the spend management software market size grows, developers will need to find ways to differentiate their products from competitors. Targeting unique industries is a natural way for them to reach this goal.

This is good for everyone because it will provide specialized solutions that meet individualized needs. Instead of using a generic version of software, you can get a version dedicated to your industry.

Valify has already embraced the benefits of industry-specific spend management software. The product was built for organizations in the healthcare sector, so you can rely on it to realize your savings goals and follow best practices that lead to ongoing success.

Reach out to Valify today to get a free demo of our spend management software. Seeing the software in action will help you decide whether it’s right for you.