Reducing administrative workload in medical and nursing environments

As part of its journey toward becoming a future-ready healthcare organization, Spital Thurgau AG is also focusing on its HR processes. Simplified and efficient expense management using Xpert’s Business Process Suite helps reduce the administrative workload for employees.

Spital Thurgau AG provides the population of the Canton of Thurgau and neighboring regions with the full range of high-quality outpatient and inpatient healthcare services. With around 4,600 employees, the hospital group comprises the acute and emergency departments of the cantonal hospitals in Frauenfeld and Münsterlingen, the Psychiatric Services Thurgau, and the St. Katharinental Rehabilitation Clinic. This structure ensures truly integrated, interdisciplinary, and well-coordinated care. As a result, Spital Thurgau has been regarded for many years as a model institution in the Swiss healthcare system, both medically and organizationally.

Customer centricity is a key priority for Spital Thurgau AG on its path toward the healthcare organization of the future. “Digitalizing HR processes is a key factor in supporting our efforts to reduce administrative workload in medical and nursing environments,” explains Sandro Gentsch, Head of Payroll at Spital Thurgau AG. “Our HR digitalization strategy revealed significant optimization potential in expense management in particular. Filling out Excel forms, manual approvals, and the time-consuming reconciliation of receipts with lists across multiple departments and hierarchical levels were processes we wanted to largely automate with a suitable application.”

Xpert impressed Spital Thurgau AG with its smart solutions and extensive experience in the healthcare sector and was therefore commissioned to implement the project. “To avoid complex interfaces, the application had to be integrable into the existing accounting system,” explains Christian Critelli, Professional Application Consultant at Xpert, describing the requirements. “The stakeholders wanted a modern, intuitive user interface and location-independent expense capture that could also be used on different devices in the future.”

Xpert’s Business Process Suite (BPS) is a cloud-based platform that enables the digitalization of business processes and offers suitable modules for every functional area. “Especially in HR, BPS provides a range of modules that increase efficiency and can be easily expanded. That’s why we recommended the Business Expenses Management module to Spital Thurgau AG,” explains Christian Critelli.

With the Business Expenses Management (BEM) module, Spital Thurgau AG now has an industry-independent, all-in-one platform for managing expenses, travel costs, and training-related expenses. Key features of the solution include fully digital, paperless, and automated expense workflows. Employees upload their expense receipts conveniently and in real time within the application. Approvals by managers are also carried out directly in the application with just a click.

Thanks to integration with Spital Thurgau AG’s internal ERP system, recorded and approved expenses are posted directly, enabling much faster reimbursements to employees.

“We leveraged our extensive experience from previous digitalization and automation projects to review each individual process step together with the cross-organizational project team at Spital Thurgau AG and redefine them where necessary,” explains Christian Critelli, describing the implementation approach. “The application underwent several test phases before going live. Through training sessions, employees were gradually introduced to the new way of working. The pragmatic yet professional implementation was the result of a straightforward and collaborative partnership between Spital Thurgau AG and Xpert.”

Spital Thurgau AG has laid the foundation for its transition to the cloud and toward a future-oriented healthcare organization. In the first step, the focus was on implementing a highly flexible and transparent expense management solution.

“With BEM, we now have a streamlined and fully digital expense management system,” says Sandro Gentsch, Head of Payroll at Spital Thurgau AG. “The integration with our ERP system as well as the efficient and intuitive user interface have been very well received by our employees.”

In the future, the solution can be expanded in an agile manner with AI and OCR functionalities. For example, expense policies could be stored in the system, enabling automatic expense approvals using AI. Enhanced reporting and integrated fraud detection will further minimize the risk of misuse. OCR automatically recognizes receipt data and further reduces the data entry effort required from employees.

Building on the experience gained from this project, Spital Thurgau AG plans additional automation initiatives to further reduce administrative activities and support its customer-centric approach.