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Healthcare is among the fastest-growing industries in the world. It encompasses sectors that offer services and goods for the patients while improving their health. When we see the stats, US national health expenditure reached around $3.65 trillion in 2019, which is expected to increase to $4.3 trillion by 2023.
With accelerating time, 3D printing in healthcare solutions was introduced to improve outcomes and benefits for patients and care providers. This was a step to revolutionize the world of healthcare. When evaluated, the global healthcare 3D printing market size was $1137.7 million in 2019 and is expected to reach $4130.9 by the end of 2026.
However, technology involvement has always given agility to the healthcare industry. Regardless of emerging technologies, EDI solutions for the healthcare industry have streamlined a lot of business processes of care providers, employers, claims, and much more. In this article, we will see what are the challenges of B2B healthcare, and how modern EDI can assist in overcoming them.
Challenges of the B2B Healthcare System
One of the important factors in the healthcare industry, other than managing patient’s and stakeholder’s data, is managing payments. Whether, it is in the form of claims or benefits. The care providers, as well as the insurance providers, have to face multiple challenges in order to manage payments that are thwarting.
The problem is not limited to healthcare but covers almost every industry. In order to deter the struggles of the industry, a B2B automated system, such as EDI, is integrated. But, B2B has its own challenges that restrict the healthcare industry from reaching the paramount of their business.
Many companies today are still following the legacy system. These systems, with time, have become slow, rigid, and lack compliance with the changing trends and culture. Moreover, the maintenance of the system has become expensive.
Struggle with the Legacy Systems
In healthcare, to solve the B2B challenge, new initiatives in payment reforms were dictated. The initiatives taken are needed to deliver value-based service. Here payers were troubled with the enormous distribution of transitions, and to offer a satisfactory experience, they were burdened to put in a great deal of endurance.
These efforts were reflected in the former year’s income growth. Consumers were pressured to opt for low-cost insurance coverage and healthcare options. All in all, it affected the administrative cost involved in healthcare.
Another pain for a healthcare organization is finding the right solution provider with prowess to support every modern format, protocol, or governance needs.
As per the 2016 CAQH index report, around $31 billion was spent each year by the healthcare sector in the name of conducting business through health plan transactions. It was also mentioned that by eliminating the manual processes, the healthcare industry can reduce its expenses by $8 billion annually.
In short, these legacy systems cannot provide the requisite customer experience despite the most exciting B2B integration technologies and expertise. On that note, the list of challenges faced by most businesses to solve B2B integration are –
- Being non-transparent
- Having weak collaboration tools
- Facilitating poor interactions
- Lacking personalized content touch
- Restricted or limited business controls
- Lack efficiency
- Lack of business context & content
- Is Intimidating
How Were These Challenges Underlined?
These challenges aren’t new, as with time – technology changes, and to overcome them organizations require expert handling so that their businesses are not easily affected by them. Healthcare is a sector with vast data to collect, store, and manage. Hence require a robust, flexible, and future-ready solution that saves time and money.
The omnipresence of B2B integration can be seen everywhere as it has become essential for almost every business. The clear advantages of integrating B2B technology in diverse industry verticals are mentioned below –
Logistics – Organizations handling enormous goods & shipment information use B2B integration for delivering accurate and timely purchase orders to shipment confirmations to advanced shipping notice.
Financial Services – The benefit of B2B in the finance industry connects numerous banks and brokerages thereby, offering robust security, governance, and audit capabilities. Additionally, the industry can have continuous and real-time visibility, which further helps them in expanding banking services to the customer.
Manufacturing – B2B integration props up the file transfer methods and workflow scenarios. Organizations can seamlessly exchange customer and supplier information while using AS2 over various STEP connections.
Retail – With B2B integration in the Retail industry, companies can easily convert X12 documents into an XML format for your ERP applications using automation. This process reduces the chargebacks, time, and fees.
Software and Technology – Today’s world is dependent on software and technology-handling organizations to provide convenience. Organizations offering cloud and software as a service have to handle a massive amount of data, especially when integrating B2B platforms, as they can handle all the heavy data lifting tasks & maintain 100% uptime.
Why Choose EDI for B2B Integration?
The modern EDI has always been a preferred method of integrating B2B in businesses. Since EDI is known to deliver security, reliability, and scalability in high-volume environments, below are the number of advantages that justify the need for EDI in B2B.
When compared to manual transaction processing –
- EDI has become imperative for retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and healthcare providers.
- Eradicating impending order fulfillment and other business functions.
- Optimized cash flow, reduced cost, and redirect resources to business initiatives.
- Accelerates cash-to-order cycle and increased ROI.
- 90% reduced costs compared to manual processing business transactions.
Compared to other B2B integration methods, EDI integration has certain advantages –
- EDI deter the need for multiple support for B2B systems.
- EDI is free from creating custom codes or integrating API for each trading partner.
- Eradicate the stress of getting sensitive apps APIs exposed.
- Add multiple trading partners within minutes compared to traditional integration systems.
- With EDI integrated into your B2B systems, organizations can easily handle a greater volume of transactions.
How EDI Integration with B2B Assists Healthcare Industry?
However, since the 90s proficient people have strived to streamline healthcare transactions with the help of B2B electronic communication and EDI implementation together saves a lot of time and money.
The standardized formats of EDI, such as the EDI 834 & more, ensures healthcare providers to quickly interpret data & benefits through business process automation. With EDI integration, organizations can employ higher-quality for patients to experience while controlling the cost. Along with cost, EDI integration with B2B can assist in –
Reducing Administrative Expenses – Integrating EDI can lower the cost per transaction. Automated systems can accelerate the productivity and growth of the business, allowing health care providers to curb major challenges.
Transfer and Receive Information Faster – EDI helps health care providers and organizations to provide better patient experiences.
Recognizing Submission Errors – Modern EDI integration solution detects the error or the root cause of the rejections of claims. These errors were difficult to detect and were time taking with the manual process.
As aforementioned, the electronic interaction may have been there for a long time, but legacy systems are no longer reliable and agile. Updating the existing systems and integrating them with the B2B system is a challenging task.
With time, EDI systems have advanced and are easy to maintain. Today’s B2B is also integrated with the latest technology encompassing software and expertise to enable a frictionless way to achieve integration needs.
The cloud-based EDI ecosystem is built to offer flexible B2B integration, which is much more comprehensive than the traditional managed services. The cloud-first organization offers robust capabilities, complete visibility, and B2B expertise that was lacking in the traditional cloud-managed services.
In a Nutshell
What we see in the future is that in-house integration will diminish while the critical B2B integration will be handed over to the managed outsourcing professionals. The modern solutions will eliminate the organization’s struggle to handle the interactions.
Critical business intelligence will become frictionless, empowering companies to deliver intuitive and self-service experiences. Thus, ingraining confidence, business agility, real-time interaction, and better competitiveness.
Author’s Bio: Alicia works with the editorial team of A3logics, a leading company offering IT consultation services. Exploring the latest technologies, reading about them, and writing her views have always been her passion. She seeks new opportunities to express her opinions, explore technological advancements, and document the details. You can always find her enjoying books or articles about varied topics or jotting down her ideas in a notebook.
