The 10th edition of Elets Healthcare Leaders Forum (HLF) brought together CFOs and IT specialists to discuss their experiences in adopting digital payment systems in organizations by pondering on challenges and the way forward. eHEALTH was the co-organiser of HLF virtual. Johar Sabuwala, Former CFO, Reliance Foundation Hospital moderated the panel.
In a virtual panel discussion, Jagannath MS, Chief Financial Officer, Columbia Asia Hospitals Pvt Ltd; Piyush Bhan, Vice President & General Manager, Salucro Healthcare Solutions; Pratik Gupta, GM, Corporate Finance & Head of Treasury, Manipal Health Enterprises; Saurabh Gupta, CFO, Sakra World Hospital; and CA Neeraj Jayaswal, CFO – India, Medicover Group, shared anecdotes of their E-payment adoption in hospitals:
Saurabh Gupta, CFO at Sakra World Hospital said, “The system integration for card payments, particularly credit cards have been the pain point. This is unacceptable in this day and age of the digital era. We integrated Wipro HIS into our PoS to reduce errors in the card reconciliation process. We are now witnessing better results, but I feel that there is still much to be achieved on this front. We also ramped up our adoption in digital payments during the Covid times, including UPI, PhonePe.”
Pratik Gupta, GM of Corporate Finance & Head of Treasury at Manipal Health Enterprises: “We always worked towards making patient-care and other operations of our hospital hassle free by exploring newer digital technologies. We have recently launched the Manipal Hospital app for better integrations of our work. The pandemic has accelerated the digital adoption process in the sector, and we will see more developments on digitalisation in the near future.”
Jagannath MS, Chief Financial Officer, Columbia Asia Hospitals Pvt Ltd, said, “We handle multiple modes of transactions. We created our own ERP which could integrate the front-end, the medical-side and the back-end; we knew a good ERP meant everything would flow in smoothly. This was the base for us for upgrading the system over the years. To give a bird’s eye view of our hospitals’ payment system, our hospitals, 83% of the transactions in value are non-cash, including credit card, NEFT, Wallet, and the remaining 17% is in cash. However, 17% of the transaction in value translates into 38% in terms of transaction volume. This is one of the challenges. Talking about reconciliation, we quickly provided developments in the return side to prevent fraudulent transactions and smoothened reconciliation.”
CA Neeraj Jayaswal, CFO – India, Medicover Group, highlighted: “There is a need for hospitals to earn foreign exchange in the non cash means to be able to maximise their earnings.” He informed about various government schemes pertaining to taxation about earning foreign exchange.”
Piyush Bhan, Vice President & General Manager, Salucro Healthcare Solutions: “Over the last 17 years, we have a platform that is already integrated and easyto-use. Our system integrates POS, Wallet, online payment across geography. Our system does not require a lot of IT infra and man-hour investing. Our system is capable of the crucial reconciliation of all forms of payments with manual interventions.”
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