3 steps to driving revenue and payment efficiency across your NHS trust

Many trusts find themselves lagging behind modern times and leaking money due to a reliance on outdated payment processes and legacy IT systems. Digital infrastructure and operational efficiency in the NHS is often lacking compared to other industries, which is even more of a concern in the wake of evolving regulations around data security and payment processing.

It’s also important that payment and revenue systems integrate seamlessly with wider finance processes and established cloud solutions, such as NEP Cloud software, enabling automation and reconciliation processes to be carried behind the scenes. If not, this can cause unnecessary headaches around manual data input and more time spent on admin.

If trusts are to thrive, not just survive, they need to embrace a more business-orientated mindset that saves money, matches modern expectations and ensures that staff have the right tools to deliver a first-class service for years to come.

Here are three key steps every trust can take to drive revenue and operational efficiency across their organisation.

Step 1: Audit your current payment processes

The first step is to take stock of your current situation by conducting a thorough review of your existing payment systems and transaction processes. This is crucial to flag up

inefficiencies, outdated practices and revenue leakage, giving you a clear understanding of where improvements are needed.

Mapping out the entire payment journey is useful, starting from how and where patients are billed right through to how payments are processed, reconciled and chased. Once you’ve identified all manual and digital systems currently in place, you can then assess their effectiveness. Are they still fit for purpose? Are they integrated with one another, or do they operate in silos? Are certain steps slow or overly complicated?

Your trust also needs to ensure full compliance with the latest PCI DSS guidelines. Any processes that pose a threat to cardholder security – such as taking card payments over the phone, manually recording details on paper, using outdated point-of-sale systems or poor encryption measures – are now heavily scrutinised and can lead to penalties, data breaches and significant reputational damage.

Step 2: Automate to minimise costly mistakes

Manual reconciliation processes are something that trusts need to address if they are to stop leaking revenue. Matching payments to invoices or accounts by hand often leads to costly mistakes that can result in missed payments or under-recovered charges.

It’s not unusual for trusts to write off thousands of pounds in unpaid charges every single month, simply because they lack a reliable system to process and track transactions.

Automated billing goes a long way to eliminate these issues, ensuring all payments are accounted for and making the debt recovery process easier to manage. In this way, automation speeds up the entire payment cycle, enabling trusts to receive funds more quickly and maintain a stronger cash flow.

It’s also a big help when payment processing software links seamlessly with internal finance systems. If not, finance teams will need to manually extract and reconcile data from multiple, disconnected platforms. This makes it nearly impossible to catch all potential errors, especially in large trusts handling thousands of transactions each month.

Step 3: Empower staff through data management and reporting

Getting a tighter grip on payment data analytics is a major benefit for trusts when it comes to maximising profitability and reporting on compliance.

Real-time data dashboards allow payment teams to spot trends related to patient payments, appointments, prescriptions and general utilisation of different services. Those insights can then help flag up issues and inefficiencies, and inform key strategic decisions regarding where payments can be maximised.

For example, a trust may identify specific services that have a higher rate of unpaid invoices which leads them to target follow-up strategies to recover these funds.

A reliable reporting function also supports teams to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. NHS trusts that can easily produce documentation required for audits, ultimately spend less time on admin and can redeploy resources to more important areas of patient services.

As a strategic partner to NEP, the only 100% NHS-owned ‘True Cloud’ ERP Finance & Procurement solution, we understand the unique challenges facing NHS trusts as they make the transition to a single, fully unified payment processing system.

Working with NEP means that together we provide a unique, innovative platform for NHS trusts that supports greater efficiency, savings and value-added benefits for members.