Managing employee benefits billing across multiple locations—whether hospitals, clinics, skilled nursing facilities, or senior living centers—is a complex process. Multi-site organizations often have difficulty managing a full monthly cycle of collecting invoices, analyzing them, and locating errors, especially when different sites and ownership groups are involved. 92% of employers find the administration of employee benefits moderately to highly complex, and for good reason. Most organizations attempt to navigate this problem by utilizing multiple complicated, internally-designed spreadsheets that require specialized knowledge to use and take dozens of hours a month to fill in, making it difficult for HR and accounting teams to synchronize and manage employee benefits at the corporate level.
The Problem: Fragmented Billing and Administrative Burdens
Multi-location healthcare organizations face unique challenges with their billing structures. In addition to the general complexity involved with benefits billing, many healthcare companies have management service organizations (MSOs) and physician groups working side by side. Skilled nursing and other elder care facilities also often have multiple (and sometimes overlapping) ownership groups. With various employee groups getting coverage through a variety of channels, benefit aggregation gets complex. With coverage flowing through different entities, to different addresses, and paid through different fund sources, it is difficult to track whether invoices have been received, paid, or processed correctly.
On the insurance side, each carrier has unique invoice formats and operates on different billing cycles. If an organization wants to do something as simple as track spending by employee, department, or carrier, it involves an enormous amount of work, often done manually by HR and accounting teams. Finally, carrier invoices are often wrong due to enrollment issues or rate discrepancies. Larger companies that don’t audit invoices monthly stand to lose six to seven figures per year in billing errors. Without a centralized system that can aggregate invoices, report on spend, and audit the invoices themselves, employee benefits will remain a high-risk and often overlooked area for overspending.
The Impact: How Billing Errors Hurt Healthcare Operations
So how do these errors manifest, and what are the real consequences for healthcare organizations?
Financial Waste: Without realizing it, many organizations are invoiced for employees who have left, under-invoiced for new employees, face incorrect billing rates, and more. Without clear visibility into benefits billing, these inaccuracies quietly siphon funds from budgets, leading to misallocated resources and unexpected expenses.
Administrative Strain: HR teams already balance a multitude of responsibilities. Chasing down invoices and addressing billing discrepancies should not be what holds them back from focusing on their workforce. Instead of being stuck in a cycle of corrections, these teams should have the tools to maintain accuracy and clarity across their organization’s benefits structure largely automatically.
Variable Billing Dates: Healthcare organizations need full transparency into what they owe and when payments are due to prevent missed deadlines that could result in coverage lapses. Large organizations with 10+ carriers might have invoices released and be due on 20 different dates.Without a structured or automated approach, a minor oversight—like a delayed payment—can create headaches for both employees and administrators, affecting workforce confidence, retention, and performance.
Staff Turnover: The custom processes that employers build to manage these issues are often created by an HR/Finance staff member that is the only person in the company who understands how the reconciliation process works. This creates organizational-level risk if that staff member leaves the company temporarily or permanently.
The Solution: A More Efficient Benefits Billing Approach
Multi-site organizations are now able to leverage automation and software services to bring order to this monthly headache.
The foundation of this approach is utilizing technology to combine all these fragmented processes into one. First, benefits billing partners can help with invoice consolidation. This involves a partner collecting invoices from multiple carriers (whether or not they are under different locations or organizations) and rolling them up into a single, structured summary. This collection can often be done fully automatically, saving even more time. This gives healthcare organizations a simple overview of their bills without any work.
Next, software can be used to combine and reorganize carrier invoices to help organizations understand their spend. After standardizing invoice data from multiple carriers, these tools can provide reports broken down by division, location, employee, benefit type, and any other custom lens an organization might want. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and enables finance teams to digest their spend directly into their accounting software, formatted how they would like.
Once invoices are collected and restructured, the final step is making sure they are actually correct. Benefits billing partners can compare carrier invoice data to HRIS enrollment data – which will help determine if the organization was over or under-billed, and why. Many organizations are too busy to fully audit invoices each month, leading to regular unnecessary spend. Benefit billing services can also pay carrier bills. Organizations can send a lump sum payment and have their vendor then pay the individual carriers, further streamlining the monthly billing cycle. Whether an organization leverages some or all of these tools, technology service partners can take weeks of work and reduce it to hours.
Strengthening Benefits Billing for Healthcare Providers
Health systems continue to grow and consolidate, and their focus is and always should be on delivering high-quality care and managing reimbursement. Modernizing benefits billing is an easy but impactful step necessary for greater efficiency and transparency. Those who outsource this function to a tech-enabled partner are better positioned to mitigate budgetary strain, maintain consistent coverage for their healthcare staff, and improve financial oversight for long-term budgeting and cost control.
Evan Rakowski
Evan Rakowski is Chief Strategy Officer of Beneration.
