Healthcare Contract Management: Moving Into The Digital Age

Introduction

The global COVID-19 public health crisis has taken a toll on virtually every industry—but perhaps none have been hit as hard as the healthcare industry. Around the world, healthcare organizations stretched beyond their capacity have been beleaguered by supply chain disruptions, shortages of essential equipment, workforce attrition, and sharp declines in revenue.

Compounding the devastating impact of the pandemic is the strict and ever-changing regulatory environment that healthcare enterprises must navigate. Nearly every aspect of the industry is overseen by multiple regulatory bodies and programs enforcing a broad array of complex regulations.

To keep up with these regulatory requirements and prepare for unforeseen black swan events, healthcare enterprises have to establish systemic transparency, where each stakeholder can get swift access to the healthcare data they need and take adequate measures in time.

But, at the same time, they must also consider the security risks, given that healthcare data contains confidential financial and personal information. This has been hard to accomplish for many healthcare enterprises that rely on legacy IT systems with limited scope for interoperability.

There is a need to make a transition to digital technologies that empower these organizations to overcome many such deficiencies and outmoded practices. Embracing innovation by investing in digital technologies enables the health system to streamline the flow of data and become equipped to endure supply chain shocks and adapt to ongoing regulatory changes promptly.

Engineering Digital Transformation Through Healthcare Contract Management

Integrating digital technology enterprise-wide allows healthcare organizations to make fundamental changes to their operational processes, strategies, and customer experience. But where does such a sweeping sea-change begin? An organization’s contracts—the vital assets that shape and govern virtually every business transaction—are a powerful engine to drive a successful digital transformation.

Contracts have a far-reaching impact that extends throughout an organization, affecting functions as diverse as risk management, compliance, procurement, sales, and finance. As the source of the data that defines how those key functions must operate, contracts are found at the core of digital transformations.

Unlocking and Utilizing the Rich Digital Data Contained in Contracts

Although contracts are packed with valuable data, that data sits largely untapped in legacy systems. Digitizing contracts and contract management processes allows enterprises to access that wealth of data. This process begins with the deployment of contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology.

CLM technology provides a platform for initiating a digital transformation. Smart CLM software can enable contract authoring, negotiation, AI-powered legal review, automated risk assessment, and execution. With the digital transformation of contracts, healthcare enterprises can migrate their commercial contracts from across a fragmented IT systems landscape and into a centralized repository.

Digitizing contracts can turn them into trackable, measurable digital objects that can be mined for analytical insights about reducing risk, expediting legal reviews, and gaining an edge in future negotiations. The digital transformation of CLM allows healthcare providers, to plug contract value leakage, manage risks, and improve commercial relationships.

Phasing Out Manual Processes with Digitization

Even today, many healthcare enterprises follow processes and leverage non-specialized, legacy systems for managing contracts. CLM technology can integrate with the existing systems, pull in contracts, digitize them, and store them in a centralized repository. A digitized contract repository lays the foundation needed to optimize healthcare contract management workflows.

Deploying a CLM platform allows organizations to phase out unwieldy manual processes that are not only costly and time-consuming, but also lead to human error. AI-driven auto-extraction platforms rapidly transform unstructured contract data into meaningful information that is organized, stored, and easily accessed in a central repository. In addition to reducing error rates, AI-based auto extraction significantly decreases the time required to process contracts.

Automated connections are formed between key processes. By connecting pre- and post-signature healthcare contract management phases, a CLM system offers performance insights and risk analytics that enable enterprises to progressively build stronger contracts, mitigate prospective risks, and achieve better business outcomes.

Keeping up with the Evolving Regulatory Landscape

CLM is a formidable tool for ensuring compliance with the multitude of regulations faced by healthcare providers such as JACHO, HITECH, ACA, and more. Digitizing contracts and the contracting process enables healthcare providers to gain visibility into obligations pertinent to regulatory compliance.

Monitoring obligations helps prevent potential violations of constantly changing regulatory requirements. CLM technology provides oversight of operational compliance with automated processes that mitigate the risks of contract violations.

Reaping the Benefits of End-to-End Contract Management for Healthcare

Advanced CLM solutions deliver end-to-end healthcare contract management with automation that streamlines all phases of the contracting lifecycle, from contract setup through ongoing performance management.

The digital transformation of the healthcare industry—accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—is bringing long-overdue change to the way health systems do business. And the AI-powered CLM technology that is now being deployed throughout the industry is unmatched in its ability to drive dynamic, transformational progress. If you are interested to know about such a smart, AI-led CLM technology solution reach out.