FISCAL Case Studies.

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University Hospitals Sussex: Case Study

University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust was processing over 140,000 supplier invoices annually, but was aware of previously undetected duplicate payments and needed greater control and protection of its payments process. They asked – we delivered. Within 5 months, ROI was over 100% and they had successfully prevented over £50,000 in duplicate payments.

Introduction

University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust (UHS) is an acute teaching hospital serving a large community in Sussex and the South East. Working across two sites in Brighton and Haywards Heath, the Trust handles more than 750,000 patient visits with a budget of approximately £535 million a year.

NHS Trust achieves 1000% ROI by preventing incorrect payments and improving process efficiency
Details

UHS’s Accounts Payable team of 5 processes 145,000 invoices a year to a supplier base of 900 accounts. Research from the IIA indicates that large organisations typically pay up to 0.1% of their invoices twice. This put an estimated 145 invoices at risk of duplicate payment. Even with good AP systems and processes, the Trust was vulnerable to overpayments and duplicate invoices. Oracle did not provide the analysis needed to uncover where the mistakes happened, while OCR technology could not reliably detect the payment issues resulting from misreadings. UHS used recovery auditors to help address the issue, and while recovered revenue results were favourable, it was disruptive to the department, retrospective, and expensive. The Trust needed a solution that was easy to use, saved time, brought the AP audit and recovery process in-house, stopped duplicate payments at source and provided insight into where and how duplicates occur.

Solution

After initial discussions with FISCAL Technologies, UHS decided to proceed with a proof of concept exercise by submitting two fiscal years’ worth of data – even data already analysed by recovery auditors. The final report revealed a number of duplicate payments that paid for the software and called into question the use of external auditors as a principle means of finding and preventing duplicate payments and fraud. UHS selected FISCAL’s forensic software for its ease of installation and immediate return on investment. FISCAL’s solution requires no direct interface to the Trust’s Oracle system, so no assistance from the IT department was required. After an upgrade to V5, the AP team is able to access the solution via web browser.

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