Hospital finance leaders live with a simple, inescapable truth: you cannot manage what you cannot predict.
Yet few organizations look closely at how insurer reimbursements move from payers into their bank accounts, even though this is one of the least predictable pieces of hospital cash flow. On the surface, virtual credit cards look like a modern upgrade from paper checks. Payers and intermediaries generate card-funded payments after claims are adjudicated and notify providers that funds are available.
In practice, however, the workflow behind those cards often behaves like a silent tax on margin, liquidity, and staff capacity.
The Silent Tax Hiding in Reimbursement Workflows
In many organizations, the reimbursement process is still highly manual. After a claim is approved, a payer or intermediary generates a virtual credit card for the allowed amount. Card details and basic remittance information are mailed or made available in portals, creating early exposure if those details are lost, intercepted, or mishandled. This is especially tangible with prepaid and single-use card models where the full value can disappear with a single compromised card.
From there, finance and revenue cycle teams:
- Open envelopes or log into portals to retrieve card numbers and amounts.
- Key 16-digit card numbers into a physical or virtual terminal.
- Match card deposits back to remittances and general ledger accounts, often with spreadsheets and workarounds.
Each step may take only minutes, but across thousands of transactions—plus postal delivery times, batching practices, and competing priorities—the lag between payer approval and fully reconciled cash can easily stretch from weeks to 60 days or more.
The impact is immediate:
- Cash sits “in process” instead of supporting daily operations or capital projects.
- Card-funded reimbursements carry transaction costs, mailing fees, and labor requirements.
- Staff spend disproportionate time on repetitive keystrokes rather than analysis, planning, and driving revenues.
None of this appears as a dedicated line on the income statement, but together it creates a meaningful drag on already thin margins.
What Straight Through Processing Changes
CSG Forte’s Straight Through Processing (STP) removes much of this friction without asking payers to change how they originate payments. STP automates the payment process, allowing healthcare providers to receive payments from insurance companies and patients (via insurance companies) in about one day.
Instead of sending virtual card details through the mail and relying on staff to finish the job, STP keeps the virtual card model but automates what happens next.
At a high level, the steps look like this:
- After adjudication, the payer or intermediary still generates a virtual card for the approved amount.
- Card and remittance data are transmitted to a payments processor rather than printed and mailed.
- The virtual card is processed and funds are deposited directly into the provider’s bank account, following standard card funding cycles.
- Payment and remittance information are delivered together electronically, streamlining posting and reconciliation in the provider’s systems.
For reimbursement streams enrolled in STP staff are no longer driving every step. They monitor an integrated electronic flow, focusing on defined exceptions.
Risk and compliance also drive the conversation. Manual, mail-driven workflows expand the footprint of card data and remittance information across your organization. STP keeps virtual card processing within encrypted, access-controlled systems, operating within HIPAA and PCI DSS requirements, and in HITRUST-aligned controls.
A Practical Starting Point
Benefitting from STP does not require ripping out core clinical or revenue systems. It starts with visibility.
- Inventory your virtual card reimbursements: Identify which payers and programs are involved, how information is delivered, how many people and steps are required, and how long it typically takes to move from approval to reconciled cash.
- Work with revenue cycle, treasury, and IT leaders to identify the highest-volume reimbursement streams with the most friction. Those are strong candidates for an initial STP pilot.
- Partner with a payments provider that can support those streams. Define a pilot cohort, enroll it, measure days-to-deposit, exception volumes, and staff effort before and after. Use what you learn to guide broader rollout. Because providers can un-enroll from STP at any time and revert to their existing workflows, this becomes an easy, low-risk way to test the process.
STP offers a way to turn that hidden cost into faster cash, tighter control, and more capacity for the work that truly moves your organization forward.
To learn more about how CSG Forte can fit into your reimbursement strategy, visit our website.
