When you’re in the market for healthcare, chances are you want comprehensive care, individualized treatment plans, and the most advanced technologies and therapies. On all those fronts, multi-specialty medical group Millennium Physicians delivers.
But if managing just one healthcare practice takes a lot of time and dedication, Millennium Physicians has their work cut out for them trying to run almost 40 offices. To give patients access to a fully-integrated healthcare network, they needed advanced technologies in their back office to support the quality services they provide on the front lines, in medical offices across the Greater Houston area.
When CFO Christopher Hopeck first joined Millennium Physicians, he quickly saw the opportunity to save a lot of time by switching to more efficient financial systems and processes.
“Everything was being tracked from a spreadsheet,” according to Hopeck. “So the first big project that we tackled was moving to a more robust, cloud-based financial system, which was Sage Intacct.” This new system gave deeper visibility into each of the practices’ income, assets, and even leases, which helped to create a comprehensive view that could guide their overall strategy.
After implementing Sage Intacct, Millennium Physicians needed to take the next step to streamline their financial systems. Enter BILL: AP automation that synced with Sage Intacct to save time, increase efficiency, and provide more control and visibility over financials.
Managing almost 40 physical offices with a single AP team is the largest challenge Millennium Physicians faces.
Hopeck explains, “We're a multi-specialty medical group, so even though we're one tax ID, we operate at financially independent practices within the group. Then everything consolidates into one set of financials, but each one of those independent practices has their own bank account. So really we have 33 financially independent practices to keep track of.” Using BILL, they created a unique email for each practice so the invoices can be emailed to the correct set of books.
Moving from a blanket account to this individualized process helps provide unique insights for each practice, as well as keep staff engaged and informed.
Prior to implementing BILL, the finance team at Millennium Physicians struggled with trying to keep up with the accounts payable needs of so many locations. They had two full-time accountants devoting 100% of their time to AP processing for the clinics. “It was a very tedious process and a poor use of our highly-skilled staff’s time,” Hopeck says.
With BILL AP automation, Hopeck has been able to completely reassign one full-time employee to handle higher level financial concerns.
“Since automating AP with BILL, we’ve been able to repurpose one full-time accounting employee to focus on more impactful strategic work like diving into financial performance and cash flow.” — Christopher Hopeck, CFO, Millennium Physicians
The individual doctors of Millennium Physicians are big fans of how they now save time and reduce errors with a streamlined approval process. According to Hopeck, “Doctors like how they can just swipe through to approve bills with the BILL mobile app. And, if you deny a bill, you can add a comment as to why it wasn’t approved.”
“Doctors like how simple and customizable the approval process is with BILL.” — Christopher Hopeck, CFO, Millennium Physicians
This streamlined approval process doesn’t just improve user experience, but shows meaningful results. Says Hopeck, “In the past, I think many bills were paid erroneously because by the time they got to the bills in Sage Intacct, medical professionals were just frustrated and hit ‘approve’ without really paying attention to what they were approving.”
Fortunately, confirms Hopeck, “The rate of wrongly approved bills has definitely decreased with BILL.”
By creating a system that is easy for doctors to use, Millennium Physicians can use one centralized AP team while still maintaining a comprehensive approval process. This reduces overpayments and ensures the practices are receiving the goods and services that they pay for.
Protecting patient data is a huge concern for Millennium Physicians, as it is for all healthcare organizations, so they prioritized financial systems that help them remain HIPAA compliant. With Sage Intacct and BILL, patient data can pass between the two systems while maintaining data security.
Says Hopeck, “With any healthcare practice—especially nowadays with so many cybersecurity threats—the ability to avoid potential data breaches and protect sensitive patient health information is imperative. Cloud-based systems protect information as best as possible. BILL helps us protect patient data and maintain HIPAA compliance.”
Millennium Physicians is able to efficiently run a complex medical group by leveraging the integrated technology of BILL and Sage Intacct.
“BILL with Sage Intacct is the winning combination for us. I wouldn’t recommend any additional setup…unless you like to operate inefficiently.” — Christopher Hopeck, CFO, Millennium Physicians
By sectioning out their AP accounts for each practice, they are able to manage each location individually from one system. Now that they don’t have to waste time with manual systems, their small, but mighty AP team spends less time on individual invoices and more time on long-term strategy. And this focus ensures the financial health for their organization so they can continue to focus on the complete health of their patients.
