In our singular moment, healthcare systems and facilities are more pressed than ever to manage costs. Overall, wages and benefits are the largest single expense for hospitals, typically accounting for 50% or more of expenses. Physician and clinical costs—a major driver of hospital and healthcare system spend—make up almost half of these hospital salary costs.

To manage this spend, hospitals need to ensure the payments they make to physicians are accurate and timely, using the correct rates for the relevant contract. Hospitals also need an ongoing, clear picture of what happened with that money—which contracts and physicians drove expenses more than others—so they can optimize physician spend over time.

Moreover, hospitals can incur significant penalties if payments to physicians are not administered correctly and in a way that’s demonstrably accurate. Using manual or partially-automated systems for tracking physician time—to contracts, facilities, or specific categories of their work—can lead not only to operationally costly errors, but to legal and regulatory exposure and financial risk as well.

Hospitals face an additional challenge with physicians spending so much of their time doing administrative tasks. Physician time spent on administrative work is estimated at 13%, which represents millions of dollars of potential optimization. Hospital administration can only reduce this substantial overhead if it has clarity on how much time is spent on what issues, and by whom.