A Single-Vendor Approach May Improve Your Payment Integrity Program


Brad Ross
Senior Vice President, General Manager Payment & Revenue Integrity, Claritev
In 2024, spending in the U.S. healthcare market reached $5.3 trillion. Research shows 30% of that number, $750 billion, was due to waste, abuse, and fraud. Clearly, healthcare payers have an urgent need for a strong payment integrity program. Many payers realize this and are using several payment integrity solutions.
In a survey of 100 healthcare payers by In90group Research, 90% of respondents said they use more than one payment integrity vendor. These payers may be inadvertently weakening their overall payment integrity program, sacrificing payment accuracy, missing out on savings, and paying more by using different vendors for pre‑pay and post‑pay functions.
A multi-vendor approach can lead to several issues, including:
- Incomplete insights
- Provider abrasion
- The need for more IT resources
- Inconsistent reporting
- Redundant fees
A Connected, End-to-End Payment Integrity Approach
Consolidating PI solutions under a single vendor can provide a connected, end to end system with the ability to deliver several operational and financial benefits over a multi-vendor approach. Here are five.
1. An Intelligent Payment Integrity Program
With multiple vendors, each vendor sees only a slice of the claims data, which can limit the effectiveness of AI models, reduce predictive accuracy, and create blind spots that can cause leakage. However, if a single vendor has access to data for both pre-pay analysis and post-pay audits, the payment integrity program has the ability to become smarter:
- Insights from post-pay reviews can be used for pre-pay prevention.
- Machine learning models can train on broader, more complete datasets.
2. Streamlined Operations
Managing multiple vendors often means juggling multiple:
- Contracts
- Service-level agreements
- Portals
- Support teams
- Implementations
With one vendor, multiple versions of the items listed above are replaced with one, helping to streamline operations and reduce the administrative burden.
3. A Better Provider Experience
Many healthcare payers prioritize positive provider relationships, yet a multi‑vendor payment integrity model can inadvertently create provider abrasion because of:
- Repeated requests for the same medical records
- Overlapping audits on the same claim
- Conflicting determinations
A single vendor can reduce these issues by coordinating outreach and presenting unified findings.
4. Streamlined Reporting
With multiple vendors, payers may have to access several dashboards to see reports relating to their payment integrity results. This may make it more difficult to understand how the program is performing overall.
With one vendor, there is one dashboard and it’s easier to see savings.
5. Lower Total Costs
Beyond performance gains, using one payment integrity vendor can provide immediate cost efficiencies:
- Bundled pricing
- Reduced implementation work
- Lower administrative overhead
- Elimination of redundant vendor fees
Clarity in Action
Payers that work with one vendor for all their payment integrity needs can gain several advantages over their competitors that use a multi-vendor approach to payment integrity. The potential advantages extend beyond better savings and include streamlined operations, less provider abrasion, and a connected program poised to transform the program from recovery to prevention as discoveries made during post-pay are used to improve pre-pay solutions.
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