How Bozeman Health uses Infor AI to get 100% OIG compliant

Infor OIG Vendor Check tool completes formerly laborious monthly exclusion list verifications in less than 5 minutes

As a primary healthcare provider in a fast-growing US city, Bozeman Health is facing the big challenge of expanding patient care and services while maintaining quality and controlling costs. Like all healthcare providers, Bozeman Health must comply with the Office of Inspector General (OIG) exclusion list, which prohibits employing or contracting with individuals or entities convicted of specific felonies or misdemeanors.

Noncompliance can lead to substantial financial costs, making the OIG vendor verification a critical area, due to the expanding supplier list. To address this, Bozeman Health acknowledges the need to optimize resources, reduce errors, and save time to support growth and prioritize patient care.

Watch this video to learn how Bozeman Health integrates AI to automate key processes. 

Due to monthly updates to the OIG exclusion list, healthcare providers must conduct monthly exclusion reconciliations for all employees, contractors, vendors, and ordering processes to ensure compliance and avoid penalties. However, this task presents significant challenges. The OIG exclusion list consists of 1 gigabyte of data that does not align consistently with the entries in an ERP database. For example, an entity named ‘Liberty Industries’ in the OIG exclusion list could be entered as ‘L Industries LLC’ in the healthcare provider’s database. Attempting to verify the data using regular expression checks are also problematic, as it may either yield incomplete results or an overwhelming number of matches. Consequently, the verification process requires human intervention to manually cross-check thousands of rows of data.

Recognizing the need for a more automated approach, Bozeman implemented an AI-driven solution called Infor OIG Vendor Check to reconcile its vendor database with the OIG exclusion list. On a monthly basis, the OIG exclusion list is uploaded to Bozeman Health’s Infor Compliance Portal from the OIG website. Infor Coleman AI works in the background using a similarity index to scan the OIG exclusion data and then generate an Infor Birst report of Bozeman Health vendors that are potentially on that exclusion list. This vendor list is then cross-checked with the OIG exclusion list.

The automated solution with Infor Coleman AI dramatically reduces the verification time since only a few flagged vendors must be verified. A process that once took several hours now takes just a few minutes — and without errors.

The Infor OIG Vendor Check tool has effectively mitigated this compliance risk while saving valuable resources that can now be directed toward enhancing patient care. Bozeman Health can now confidently check off OIG exclusion list compliance during its annual audit checks, further reducing the overall cost of compliance. The results are:
• 100% OIG vendor compliant
• Save hours of work, with OIG Vendor Check now completed in less than 5 minutes
• Just 5 days to implement the tool and achieve value realization

Bozeman Health now has a more automated and accurate process to verify vendors using the underlying Infor OS Platform Technology with Infor CloudSuite Healthcare to extend ERP capabilities. Data Lake, AI/ML, analytics, reporting, portal and more are all integrated services that come with Infor OS. For OIG Vendor Check, the OIG exclusion list data is uploaded to the Infor Data Lake, and then Infor Coleman AI flags vendors, and results are presented through Infor Portal, which is available on demand to conduct the verification. Because all these services are integrated, the implementation of the AI solution was completed in an impressive timeframe of just 5 days.

In the healthcare industry, accomplishing more with limited resources is an ongoing challenge, especially with evolving regulations. Leveraging technology like the Infor OS platform, which Bozeman Health already possessed, to automate labor-intensive regulatory processes is a transformative development. It enables the reallocation of resources to prioritize patient care and save lives, the ultimate goal of healthcare providers.

In April 2024, Infor Coleman AI was renamed and simplified to Infor Artificial Intelligence (AI). The functionality and services of Infor Coleman AI are still available within the InforOS ecosystem, even as the Coleman name has been retired.