Growth is supposed to be the good problem. For a radiology network expanding through acquisition, it usually isn’t, at least not in accounts payable.
Every new imaging center means new vendors, new invoice formats, and more manual work landing on an AP team that was already stretched thin. The default response is the one most healthcare finance leaders know too well: add headcount to keep pace with invoice volume. It works, until it doesn’t, and it never actually fixes the underlying process.
RadNet, which operates 400 imaging centers across the United States and continues to expand internationally, hit exactly this wall.
The problem: OCR wasn’t built for this scale
RadNet’s AP department was leaning on OCR (optical character recognition) to digitize invoices, and running into the limitations most healthcare organizations eventually discover: accuracy problems with poor-quality scans or handwritten documents, formatting that didn’t survive the conversion, and processing speeds that, in some cases, were slower than just keying the data in manually.
The bigger structural issue: only 40% of RadNet’s invoices were tied to a purchase order. That meant the majority of invoices needed extensive manual handling, invoice by invoice, with no automated path through the system. As RadNet grew, so did the manual workload, and so did the AP headcount required to manage it.
For a multi-site healthcare organization actively pursuing M&A, this isn’t sustainable. Every new facility needs a consistent, efficient onboarding process, not a repeat of the same manual bottleneck.
The shift: SmartPDF instead of more OCR, or more people
Working with Extropy, RadNet implemented Basware’s SmartPDF technology, an AI-driven approach to invoice processing built to handle exactly the accuracy and matching problems OCR struggles with.
“SmartPDF, in my opinion, is a really good piece of technology. Even at line level reconciliation, the small quantity of errors that we find compared to the volume of invoices is impressive.”
— Jacob Simon, National Director of Purchasing, RadNet
“Using SmartPDF means there is less configuration than creating a direct connection with the vendor, while at the same time increasing matching accuracy.”
— Jacob Simon, National Director of Purchasing, RadNet
The results
- 100% accuracy rate on invoices processed through the system
- 77% of invoices now processed via SmartPDF instead of OCR
- 75% of non-PO invoices processed using SmartCoding, with no AP intervention required
- 85% touchless processing rate for PO invoices
- Invoice cycle time cut from 20 days to under 5 days for 80% of invoices
“With Basware, we’ve been able to create a more effective workflow throughout the company. The match rate has helped us automate 85% of our invoices. We’ve gone from 20-day invoice processing to 80% of invoices in the system for less than 5 days.”
— Jacob Simon, National Director of Purchasing, RadNet
Just as important as the percentages: RadNet didn’t need to keep expanding its AP headcount to absorb continued growth. The team that used to be buried in manual data entry now has room to engage more proactively with internal stakeholders and vendors, and to support functions like procurement in identifying cost savings, the kind of work that turns an AP department from a cost center into a strategic one.
What this means if you’re running AP for a multi-site healthcare organization
RadNet’s starting point is a familiar one across healthcare imaging, diagnostics, and other multi-site provider networks: an AP team doing its best with OCR and manual review, adding people as invoice volume grows, and a purchase-order match rate too low for most automation tools to make a real dent.
The lesson isn’t “buy better OCR.” It’s that the invoice-matching technology and the implementation partner matter more than most organizations initially assume, particularly when a big share of invoice volume falls outside a clean PO match. Getting to 85% touchless processing on that kind of invoice mix took the right technology (SmartPDF) and an implementation built around RadNet’s actual invoice patterns, not a generic rollout.
If your AP team is scaling headcount every time your organization grows, that’s usually a sign the process, not the people, needs to change.
Read the full RadNet case study here.
Book a Discovery Call to see what touchless AP processing could look like for your organization.
