Becker's Hospital Review

13 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING pandemic. In particular, he developed what became HealthChain, a sophisticated tool that played an important role in Baptist Health's operations during the pandemic. To allow other healthcare organizations to benefit, Godfrey collaborated with Baptist Health Innovations to commercialize HealthChain. HealthChain helps supply chain teams reduce invoice match exceptions. These exceptions, which stem from discrepancies between purchase orders, receipts and invoices, can result in significant leakage of money. Unresolved invoice match exceptions can also generate credit holds. "In healthcare, when credit holds occur, supplier delay can impact clinical workflows and lead to frustration for frontline teams," Godfrey said. "HealthChain helps proactively prevent these situations before they disrupt patient care." Extensive time and effort go into investigating and resolving invoice match exceptions. At many health systems, the work is highly manual and time-consuming, making it ripe for innovation. As healthcare organizations grow or acquire other hospitals, the volume of match exceptions simply increases. Well aware of how broken the process was, Godfrey decided to take a completely different approach to solve the problem — one rooted in innovation. "We knew we wanted bi-directional communication, while maintaining the enterprise resource planning (ERP) as our source of truth for invoice match exceptions. We've leveraged technology to resolve match exceptions in a truly innovative way. That is how we came up with HealthChain," Godfrey said. HealthChain automates the resolution of match exceptions. It manages the communications that surround and support ERP transactions, while enabling seamless communication among clinicians, administrators, supply chain professionals and suppliers. Godfrey explained that unlike other third-party solutions that can only address specific scenarios, HealthChain is equipped to handle all types of exception handling. It uses predefined criteria to classify each exception and assign ownership, eliminating the need for manual triage. HealthChain then automatically creates a "case" for each exception and sends a templated email to the appropriate internal department. In the first year of using HealthChain, Baptist Health resolved nearly 37,000 match exceptions and managed almost 98,000 emails in the application. The average resolution time dropped to nine days, a dramatic improvement over the industry average of more than 65 days. "Faster invoice match exception resolution unlocked early payment discounts," Godfrey said. "Incorporating these discounts into our pricing agreements has become a strategic priority. To date, the initiative has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings and staff has been redeployed to work on more strategic supplier- related initiatives." Given the immense value that HealthChain delivered to Baptist Health, Godfrey worked with Baptist Health Innovations to make it available to healthcare systems and integrated delivery networks (IDNs) nationwide. Godfrey created the application and developed the integration within the Salesforce platform. "We protected the proprietary approach via five pending patent applications and engaged in licensing the capability to a preferred Salesforce system integrator called Penrod," Bhakuni said. Innovative ideas from Baptist Health are improving healthcare operations nationwide A number of IDNs have engaged with Penrod and are now in various stages of HealthChain implementation. UVA Health is one of those organizations. Like Baptist Health, Ms. Garrison's team will use HealthChain to reduce credit holds, take advantage of prompt pay discounts, prioritize exceptions to ensure the organization meets all supplier terms and conditions, and address open orders. "Automation of supplier communications is so important," Garrison said. "Having the ability to formally dispute invoices within a day of the invoice being presented allows for resolution times to be reduced from months to days." Automating backorder communications with suppliers is also a big focus. If the supply chain team can get that information to clinicians as quickly as possible, they can make necessary procedural or clinical changes. According to Coticchia, the HealthChain commercial collaboration is a great example of nonclinical advancement that is dramatically helping healthcare operations. Garrison agreed, calling HealthChain a transformation for supply chain management. "It's taking members of the team who were sending out hundreds of emails to resolve exceptions and moving them into more analytical roles," she said. Reflecting on nonclinical opportunities for innovation like HealthChain, Katzen observed that a good first step is for organizations to publicize that they are open to new ideas and create an environment where employees are comfortable bringing ideas forward. "We've created the infrastructure and put in place the resources to take those ideas forward, " he said. "The process of moving from an idea to a successful innovation is a winding road. You need the infrastructure and people to navigate the turns and pivots so you can get to the endpoint successfully." Baptist Health South Florida is the region's largest healthcare organization, with 12 hospitals, more than 28,000 employees and 4,000 physicians. Its network includes over 200 outpatient centers, urgent care facilities and physician practices across South Florida. Baptist Health is home to internationally renowned institutes specializing in cancer care, brain and spine care, heart and vascular care and orthopedic care. Baptist Health South Florida is an academic and clinical affiliate of Florida International University. A not-for-profit organization, Baptist Health is supported by philanthropy and committed to its charitable mission of medical excellence.

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