Managing 37 nursing facilities, one assisted living, one hospice agency, and five home health companies in Florida and Ohio, Greystone Healthcare Management is one of the leading groups in the healthcare industry. However, Greystone faced a significant challenge in trying to keep up with ever-changing regulations. With a typically paper-intensive process, Greystone was seeking other electronic tools to make their processes more efficient.
Having over a decade of experience in the market, Greystone has been successful by following its core principles. These principles include: using best practices, investing in its people, and striving to exceed expectations. The company is constantly rethinking, retooling, rebuilding, and reinventing ways to transform as well as further improve its operations to provide the best quality of care.
Business Need – A Paper Intensive Process
Greystone had a few challenges and concerns. One of their main challenges was managing over 95 bank accounts for 44 properties. These paper-intensive process included staying within strict regulatory guidelines. This created significant operational challenges. For instance, they sent an average of 1,5000 checks each week, which used a significant amount time. Sending checks required postal preparation and a manual review for over 3,000 vendors. In addition to this, they had concerns about a few key issues:
- The potential for check fraud
- Higher per payment costs
- Inefficient use of resources
- The overall time-consuming process of issuing payments
Greystone was able to turn these various concerns into forces for change. Initially, the company considered a DIY solution but soon realized that this required too much time. It wasn’t cost-effective for the amount of work involved. They also looked at an AP card solution to avoid vendor maintenance. However, card processing from the perspective of vendors was too complex for this solution to work.
Technology Solution – Paymode-X Electronic Payment System
Greystone chose the Paymode-X electronic payment network through Bottomline Technologies for handling paper checks and converting them to ACH. Because Greystone used this platform, they were able to outsource acquiring and keeping up with bank account information from vendors. They also increased payment security by transitioning from check to ACH.
By using this system, Greystone could avoid the risk of keeping vendor account and bank data, as all of this information was stored within the network. Additionally, Paymode-X offered a central location to view payment activity and audit payments online. These changes made it possible for Greystone to decrease costs per payment as well as other banking fees. This was done by minimizing the time-consuming procedure of check processing.
Using the Paymode-X payment system was great for vendors, as they didn’t have to do anything, as the money automatically goes to their account and everything is delivered electronically. Allowing the network to do all of the work for enrolling vendors and being bank agnostic was a major factor in Greystone deciding to partner with the Paymode-X payment system.
Final Results
The implementation of Paymode-X made it possible for Greystone to not only streamline processes, but also decrease costs, reduce paper waste, earn rebates, and outsource non-core business tasks. The AP department is now a revenue generator, as Paymode-X played an essential role in this process. Greystone was able to seamlessly transition from using paper checks to a paperless system with electronic payments. These key benefits include:
- Automation of more than 26,000 payments
- Reduction in bank service fees and costs
- Improved reporting process
- Earned rebates
- Less complex reconciliation
- Enhance payment security
Using Paymode-X benefited Greystone in various ways by converting their process from handling paper checks to an electronic payment system.
