NEWS – eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth
Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora has completed the national rollout of its Financial, Procurement, and Information Management (FPIM) system, integrated with an AI-powered accounts payable (AP) invoice scanning solution.
FPIM brings all districts and entities under a single national financial platform, while the AP solution is aimed at streamlining invoice processing, reducing manual data entry, and improving supplier communication.
The final stage of onboarding for FPIM was completed in June 2024 and means that all financial transactions within Health NZ now flow through the national system.
Head of FPIM implementation and data, Nigel Bernie, explains that “anything that triggers a financial transaction will end up in FPIM.
“It is about providing one place where all the financial transactions are stored,” he says.
With FPIM now in business-as-usual (BAU) mode, Health NZ is focused on ongoing improvements and working with the wider organisation to expand the system’s capabilities.
He says one of the major advantages of the national solution is the ability to make procurement more efficient and cost-effective.
“We have been able to introduce some changes that make it easy for people to buy the right thing at the right time, at the right price, and from the right supplier,” Bernie says.
With visibility of national inventory, the organisation can better manage its supply chain.
“They have now got a view of the entire organisation and where their inventory sits, whereas previously they would have had to go into various systems to collect that,” he says.
FPIM has also become the single payment engine for healthcare service agreements, replacing legacy invoice-based systems.
As part of the transition, older financial systems have been decommissioned and, when combined with the FPIM data platform, this enables the phasing out of legacy reporting tools over time, Bernie says.
Mel Patrimonio, Health NZ financial transactions manager, says the new AP invoice scanning solution, built on the Esker platform, integrates with FPIM and is designed to increase efficiency in handling invoices.
“A lot of our invoices have multiple lines—some have hundreds—and trying to match them and enter them into our financial system manually takes a lot of time,” she says.
“We know that volume increases over time, and we cannot continually put more resources into entering invoices into FPIM.
“The system also reduces manual entry errors because if you are entering a large volume of data, even a simple mistake like entering a date incorrectly can cause issues.”
Patrimonio says another advantage of the solution is the ability to cross-check invoices against Health NZ’s master data.
“We can then make sure that we are paying the right supplier because the system will check the invoice details and verify them against our records,” she says.
“If there’s any variance, the AP clerk can review it.”
She adds that the AI component means the solution is always improving as it learns from the corrections made.