10 Questions: The Best Ways to Manage Expenses in Healthcare

What are the best ways to manage healthcare expenses?

Misconduct can greatly affect public trust and safety.

As a result, healthcare and life sciences organisations, especially those working internationally, face stricter compliance rules.

Today, global HCP (Healthcare Professional) transparency regulations, including Sunshine Laws and equivalents, are evolving rapidly, placing greater pressure on companies to disclose financial interactions with HCPs and healthcare organisations (HCOs). Compliance is no longer just a legal requirement; it’s an ethical imperative.

Yet, tracking expenses manually in this complex landscape isn't that easy. Regulatory reporting, attendee tracking, and data reconciliation across borders can quickly become a logistical nightmare.

10 questions healthcare organisations can use to stay compliant and improve expense management in 2025

1. What type of expense platform or solution is best for healthcare?

The best expense platform for healthcare should prioritise compliance, offer custom workflows for medical use cases (like HCP travel or mileage claims), and integrate with HR and finance systems. It must support fraud prevention, provide real-time reporting, and scale across multi-entity healthcare organisations. A cloud-based, compliant, and integrated solution is ideal.

In 2025, secure, cloud-enabled platforms enable real-time collaboration, remote accessibility, and seamless integrations with other healthcare systems.

Mobilexpense also support integrations with HCP directories such as MediSpend, MedPro, Tucania, and IQVIA. 

These integrations help:

• Speed up data entry
• Improve accuracy
• Reduce manual errors

The platforms are designed to:

• Comply with data protection laws (e.g. GDPR)
• Offer secure data storage
• Provide auditable trails for compliance

2. How can you keep expense policies compliant globally? 

Expense policies should be tailored to reflect the latest national and international compliance frameworks, including Sunshine Laws, the EFPIA Disclosure Code, and the Loi Bertrand in France.

For example, the US Sunshine Act still exempts individual expenses under $10 until a $100 annual threshold is reached per HCP. But staying on top of such nuanced rules across multiple jurisdictions requires automation. With expense tools like Mobilexpense, companies can set automated limits, alerts, and policy flags to manage exceptions and maintain control.

3. What are pre-approval workflows, and how do they support compliance in healthcare?

Pre-approval workflows are processes that require expenses to be reviewed and authorised before they are incurred. In healthcare, this is especially important for ensuring compliance with strict industry regulations and internal policies.

These workflows help by:

• Confirming budget availability in advance
• Ensuring the expense is necessary and policy-compliant
• Providing real-time updates on budget status
• Automating notifications to reduce manual admin work
• Preventing conflicts of interest, especially for spend involving HCP (healthcare professional) interactions
• Documenting and authorising each touchpoint to maintain transparency and audit readiness

By starting the compliance process early, pre-approval workflows reduce risk and help healthcare organisations stay in control of their spend.

4. How can data analytics support transparency in expense management?

Advanced data analytics enables healthcare organisations to make smarter, faster decisions while maintaining transparency.

Tools like Mobilexpense expense tracker help identify trends in spending behaviour, flag anomalies, and assess compliance risks. In line with Sunshine Laws, analytics dashboards can help organisations track spend by HCP, region, project, or category, making regulatory reporting both easier and more accurate.

5. What are the benefits and challenges of switching to digital receipts and documentation for healthcare organisations

Paper-based receipts are unreliable and increasingly non-compliant. In 2025, organisations are expected to use digital documentation for every step of the expense cycle.

Read more about how to go paperless here.

Mobilexpense allows users to upload receipt images on the go, link them to specific attendees, and store everything in a centralised, searchable database. This makes audits faster and ensures a complete, compliant record of every financial interaction.

6. How does automating reconciliation reduce errors?

Manual reconciliation is prone to errors and creates unnecessary delays. Automated systems now handle this process more efficiently: cross-checking claims, receipts, policies, and thresholds without human intervention.

In industries with complex financial regulations like life sciences, this level of automation supports both regulatory compliance and internal accountability.

7. Why review vendor contracts for HCP compliance?

Vendor relationships must align with transparency regulations. In 2025, many countries now require that contracts with vendors be disclosed, especially if those vendors are involved in HCP-facing activities.

Periodic reviews of vendor agreements ensure alignment with current legal obligations and allow for cost control and improved oversight.

8. How does training improve compliance in healthcare?

Compliance starts with people. Companies must ensure that employees are trained in the latest policies, data entry practices, and reporting standards.

Training should be global in scope but locally relevant, reflecting regulatory nuances across different jurisdictions. Embedding compliance awareness into company culture reduces risk and promotes responsible spending.

9. What’s the role of audits and monitoring?

Real-time monitoring and regular audits are essential for keeping expense management in check. Mobilexpense generates audit trails automatically, allowing finance teams to trace issues back to their source and resolve discrepancies quickly.

This continuous improvement approach ensures that policies remain effective and aligned with evolving regulatory demands.

10. How can we improve expense compliance processes in healthcare?

The healthcare compliance landscape is in constant flux. New frameworks, like Global HCP Transparency and updates to existing ones (e.g. the expanded Open Payments Program in the US), mean that organisations must remain agile.

Automated expense systems provide the scalability and flexibility needed to adapt without overhauling processes every time a new rule is introduced.

11. (Bonus:) What are the top compliance challenges in 2025?

As outlined in our recent blog on Financial Transparency in Healthcare, regulatory complexity is rising. From EFPIA’s Disclosure Code to JPMA in Japan, each region has its own expectations around transparency.

The US Sunshine Act remains a global reference point, with its structured reporting system and centralised public data access through the Open Payments Program. However, the regulatory picture differs across countries:

• France’s Loi Bertrand mandates disclosures of all transfers of value above €10, including detailed contracts.
• UK’s ABPI Code encourages voluntary transparency with self-publication formats.
• Some regions follow mandatory legal frameworks, while others rely on industry self-regulation.

This fragmented environment makes manual compliance unsustainable, especially for multinational organisations.

Conclusion

Expense management in healthcare and life sciences is no longer a simple administrative function. It’s a strategic pillar of compliance, ethics, and operational excellence.

Whether you’re managing spend in Europe, the US, Asia, or across all three, these best practices ensure that every financial interaction is recorded, traceable, and defensible.

Download our eBook on Sunshine Law compliance in life sciences and discover how to build a future-proof, transparent expense management process.