“The ENCORE solution has helped the hospital reduce time spent on checking the claims status for every submission. It has also sped up the verification process of reconciliation with the relevant parties. We look forward to reaping the benefits from the time savings and accuracy for staff to focus on other core activities such as improving both patients’ and doctors’ experience and satisfaction."
Chong Hengkang, Senior Manager, Finance, Mount Alvernia Hospital
Founded in 1961, Mount Alvernia Hospital is Singapore’s first private and only not-for-profit Catholic hospital. It operates as a 319-bed general acute care hospital with tertiary medical capabilities and two multi-disciplinary medical specialist centres. As a not-for-profit institution, fiscal surpluses are accumulated and channelled to support the Assisi Hospice, hospital development, and local community outreach activities.
Freed up resources for better patient care
Improved working capital and cost savings
Eliminated human errors from manual processes
Mount Alvernia Hospital in Singapore needed to improve reconciliation efficiency with a solution that eliminated manual processes.
Settlement and reconciliation for a single medical bill is typically a complex process since it involves multiple payments from different sources, including insurance companies, the patient’s personal bank account, and the Medishield insurance component of their Central Provident Fund account.
For payment by insurance companies, the hospital had to manually extract payment details from payment advices and then check them against credit transactions on statements to validate patient bills have been settled.
To further complicate matters, excess or duplicated payments made by insurance companies, possibly due to an update in patient diagnosis, required additional reconciliation efforts.
DBS provided Enriched Consolidated Receivables (ENCORE) to address Mount Alvernia’s reconciliation challenges. ENCORE uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to overcome the manual extraction of payment details from the payment advices provided by different insurance companies. Relevant payment information from other sources such as patients’ own bank accounts and CPF accounts are also extracted by the system. The extracted information is then standardised and consolidated into a single enriched file for reconciliation.
The key benefit of ENCORE for Mount Alvernia has been the reduction in Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) due to faster turnaround in accounts receivable reconciliation. This reduction improves the hospital’s working capital management, resulting in cost and resource savings that have been allocated to more value-added activities. The automation of the reconciliation process also minimises human error.
With the implementation of ENCORE, Mount Alvernia Hospital achieved straight-through reconciliation, eliminating the need to manually extract data from payment advices. Time and resources previously used for manual reconciliation activities are freed up to provide better patient care management.
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