How is SpendMend Just Like the Easter Bunny?

SpendMend Team

Written By: Tom Flynn, VP of Marketing

On Easter mornings when I was young, my parents used to hide plastic eggs all around the house with little surprises in them. Some eggs had chocolate candy inside. (I liked those) Some eggs had dental floss in them. (I didn’t like those eggs very much) And some eggs contained money (I liked those eggs most of all)

I am the youngest of all my siblings and there was one Easter Sunday when I was the only one left taking part in the egg hunt. At that stage, my older siblings preferred to help my parents prepare and hide the eggs.

And boy, did they get into it.  They were going to make me work for it. They hid more eggs in more difficult locations, but keep in mind, that also meant more candy and more money… and it was all mine.  I simply had to find it.

I had to work for it.

I was now one person in search of a couple dozen eggs spread across an entire house. I remember that year, I had searched for almost ten minutes and discovered only one egg.   I was annoyed and dejected.  I knew the hidden treasures were out there somewhere, but I was having a hard time finding them.

So, what should I have done?

1.    Look in a few obvious hiding spots, find a small number of eggs and call it “quits”
2.    Get creative, spend more time looking and diligently go through the entire house to locate all the eggs

Of course, I went with choice number 2. I stuck with it and I got ‘em all! I got all the chocolate and all the coins and crumpled bills tucked into every single plastic egg.  The same philosophy can be applied to SpendMend’s approach to Profit Recovery Auditing.  We select choice number 2, as well…

After 28 years in business, SpendMend currently serves more than 100 healthcare system clients spanning over 2700 hospitals, clinics, locations, etc., across the U.S.  In a given quarter, we receive several terabytes of client spend data comprising billions of dollars in transactions while at the same time, we also support over 60,000 vendor interactions and touchpoints. Our unique ability to access and review Dark Data throughout the Health System Cost Cycle enables us to review more data than any other competitive firm and because of this we have blown away the industry benchmark for recovery percentages.

If I was explaining this to my childhood self, I would say, “We search the entire house and we find ALL the eggs that are hidden and a couple more beyond that, too.” Our industry-leading recovery averages come in at about .125%.   In other words, we deliver our clients $1.25 million in bottom-line recoveries per every $1 billion of their annual spend.

Now that kind of money will buy a lot of chocolate candy… and dental floss, too.

Happy Easter Everybody!

Where Visibility Meets Actual Recovery

SpendMend Team

By: Michael Koory – Regional VP of Sales – Mid America

In the last post ( Read it Here) I discussed the importance of being able to see your entire hospital as one whole entity. As discussed, a typical traditional 3 years back cost recovery firm will find savings missed inside and outside of your system. Recovery by itself is not enough, nor is it good enough for the changing healthcare environment. Only an in-depth continuous audit with deep dynamic analytics will reveal every issue or confirm your processes’ work.

 

Deep analytics give rise to the following types of questions:

1.    Why did we have $2M in duplicates caught last month?

2.    What is the full value of our unprocessed returns?

3.    How are many duplicates payments made?

4.    Where does our return process break down?

 

The force multiplier is root cause analysis and mending.  The ability to ask why is this happening?  Where does our system come unstitched?  How do we mend this?

Recently, a hospital was able to recover a $1,000,000 duplicate payment that had evaded their internal controls.  In fact, during the process, it was revealed that the internal system had gaps in their measures.  The deep analytics and horizontal view across their enterprise discovered the issues and pointed the internal team toward the corrective measures. This is where recovery and visibility meet to deliver recovery and resolute savings.