A New Healthcare Transaction Paradigm
The bill-only problem is not a billing problem. It is a transaction design problem. The lack of alignment between buyer and seller before the order is placed is what causes errors, reconciliation queues, and lost revenue on both sides. Helia has replaced the bill-only process with something that actually fixes it.
The root cause
The bill-only transaction has a root cause that most solutions never address.
About 50% of a hospital’s supply chain expenditures are paid after the product has been used. Sales reps deliver medical devices to operating rooms for joint replacements, pacemakers, and other implant procedures. The hospital pays afterward. And between case close and invoice, there is a long, manual, error-prone process that costs both sides time and money.
The reason is simple: there is no alignment between supplier and hospital about price, terms, and product when the device is delivered. There is usually a contract. But that contract is not validated at the point of use, it is reconciled after the fact, one mismatch at a time.
Two approaches to the same problem
There are two ways to handle the misalignment between buyer and seller in a bill-only transaction.
The first is the approach most bill-only solutions take: deal with the misalignment by reconciling it at every step of the transaction process. Multiple encounters between different departments at both the hospital and the supplier. Slow, expensive, and it keeps happening because the root cause is never addressed.
The second is the Helia approach: eliminate the misalignment by validating both sides of the transaction before the order is placed, not after the invoice arrives.
Current bill-only services do not fix the problem. They treat the symptoms. And they do so after the case has already closed, when cleanup is the only option.
We’ll show you what bill-only errors are costing your system.
How Helia works
Helia validates contracts and pricing against both the health system’s system and the supplier’s simultaneously — before the PO is ever created. When both sides agree upfront, the order is clean before it is ever submitted. The transaction closes the same day.
For suppliers, invoice is generated automatically the same day the order is approved. For health systems, off-contract items are flagged at the point of use — not surfaced weeks later on an invoice. For reps, the order is placed in under two minutes and a completion notification arrives when it is done.
This is not a faster path to reconciliation. It is a platform that eliminates it.
