Meharry Medical College achieves fully automated compliance monitoring for all vendors

Partnership with ProviderTrust delivers key compliance insights and payment eligibility of Meharry’s vendor network

ABOUT MEHARRY MEDICAL COLLEGE

Meharry is the largest private, historically Black academic health sciences center in the U.S. Founded in 1876, Meharry is the first medical college in the South for African Americans and is located in Nashville, Tennessee.

Today, Meharry enrolls more than 900 students across schools of medicine, dentistry, graduate studies and research, and applied computational science. Meharry also provides care for patients in the Nashville community.

THE CHALLENGE

Ensuring vendor partners meet federal and state compliance requirements is an integral part of risk management operations at Meharry. But ensuring comprehensive verification checks and ongoing monitoring of Meharry's 1,000+ vendor relationships was tedious work for Director of Compliance and Associate General Counsel Ronette Adams-Taylor's small but mighty compliance team. Speed to vendor contracts sometimes caused compliance data gaps, opening up the risk of allowing money out the door before vital verification checks and ongoing monitoring checks were completed. The vendor onboarding process was too manual, and keeping pace was challenging.

Meharry is committed to advancing health equity for all – it’s at the heart of everything they do. And for the Meharry compliance team, upholding the integrity of government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid is a fiduciary duty that ultimately helps keep all patients safe.

“It’s about stewardship. Our goal is to be stewards to our patients. In order to do that, we have to ensure that we are prudent from an ethical standpoint,” said Adams-Taylor.

THE SOLUTION

Meharry Medical College implemented Comprehensive Vendor Compliance, ProviderTrust’s vendor monitoring solution, to streamline vendor data collection and automate ongoing monitoring of federal and state exclusion lists. Combining ProviderTrust’s industry-leading exclusion monitoring technology with bidirectional financial benefits in an innovative new partnership model allows both organizations to address one of the most difficult population monitoring challenges – vendor entities, vendor owners, and vendor employees.

“Compliance within the healthcare space is crucial. Ensuring our vendor partners meet federal and state compliance requirements is an integral part of our risk management operations at Meharry,” Adams-Taylor said. “ProviderTrust allows us to easily monitor state and federal exclusion lists, the likes of SAM.org and Medicaid, in order to establish that our vendor network is safe and fraud-free. Vendor monitoring is one of the many ways that we commit to our core value of integrity without exception.”

With complimentary, ongoing federal & state exclusion monitoring for vendor populations, Meharry Medical College is able to:

Onboard, manage, and monitor its entire vendor network with confidence and ease in one central location

Automate compliance monitoring for vendors with continuous exclusion screening

Integrate compliance status into their payments workflow so checks are cut for compliant vendors only

Eliminate hours of tedious and manual work for full-time employees

Maintain compliance with federal and state regulations enabling Meharry to continue funding education

About Comprehensive Vendor Compliance

“I cannot express enough how much we have been appreciative of the services of ProviderTrust. It helps me sleep at night that I don't have to worry about coming in and we're on the HHS’s [U.S. Department of Health & Human Services] top list.”

Ronette Adams-Taylor

Director of Compliance and Associate General Counsel

THE RESULTS

monitored

Meharry now monitors 100% of their entire vendor network, guaranteeing compliance and fraud-free vendor relations.

pre-verified

90% of Meharry's vendors are verified as compliant before an invoice is paid, ensuring every check meets all federal and state compliance requirements.