Enterprises and large health systems face decreasing margins and an industry-wide move towards complex, value-based contracting models. Many of these organisations still take a manual approach to managing hundreds to thousands of contracts when they should be using contract lifecycle management (CLM) software.
Manual contract management processes increase costs and liabilities, leak revenue, and can cause negative personnel and patient experience. It’s an outmoded strategy, which hampers streamlined operations, decreases compliance and detracts from your bottom line. This is where contract lifecycle management software can make the difference.
Healthcare-specific contract management lags behind
Technology, regulations and demands evolve rapidly, and the healthcare industry is struggling to keep up. The majority of healthcare organisations rely on spreadsheets, fragmented file storage and email to manage contracts. Manual contract management not only slows contract cycles down, it costs healthcare systems over one hundred billion dollars every year.
The failing system increases the margin for error, misses information, doesn’t provide cross-departmental transparency and access to data, can’t prevent unauthorised changes, doesn’t support bulk actions including signing and amendments, and is unable to effectively and consistently safeguard sensitive data.
Manual contract management can cause a plethora of issues for healthcare organisations, but how does the looming high cost of business acceleration reveal itself? Take a look at some of these manual healthcare contract management symptoms:
- Missed reimbursements due to confusing submission requirements and inconsistent policies
- Lack of standardisation of required terms, contract templates and legal changes cause revenue leakage. Costs continue without contract automation to help maintain compliance for regulations, reforms, new laws, and evolving standards
- Lack of cross-departmental transparency results in missed requests, unpredictable turnaround times, missed key dates and milestones for contract renewals, expirations and terminations
- Procurement challenges increase if organisations are unable to keep up with thousands of supplier contracts, resulting in price changes and discrepancies, duplicate spending issues, addendums and unnecessary renewals
- A workplace culture of negativity can arisefrom unequal distribution of contract administration, and deficiencies in leadership and accountability for managing contracts.
Healthcare contract lifecycle management that integrates and enhances the current process with automation is the remedy.
Making the case for contract lifecycle management software
- Healthcare leaders must find a contract management solution that will help all stakeholders in critical areas.
- General Counsel needs access to real-time data to ensure payments align with agreed payment schedules.
- Compliance needs document access and transparency to identify contracts that have been executed correctly and those that are not compliant.
- Operations are focused on process management and capital and service purchasing, so they need a reliable way to increase cash flow and manage costs.
To address these key areas, healthcare leaders should find a solution that provides contract centralisation, accessibility, visibility and automation to improve payment accuracy, negotiation strategy and net patient revenue. Any solution should also excel at automating contract tasks, creating complete audit trails and reducing risk. Leading CLM software that can help healthcare organisations:
- increase productivity by capturing all contract-related data in an easy-to-use system with unlimited contract storage
- proactively manage all contract details, deadlines, renewals, and legal and financial obligations
- leverage intelligent workflows for request and rebate tracking
- generate contracts fast with pre-approved templates, contract data-merging and contract artificial intelligence
- manage contracts within complex organisational structures with accessible, accurate, and actionable data
- automate the entire contract lifecycle.
Better contract management for the healthcare industry
A new approach is required for healthcare organisations to remain profitable while creating patient-centric organisations. Contract Insight® is an advanced contract lifecycle management software backed by AI that allows you to manage, track and draft contracts faster, and automate and streamline the entire contract lifecycle with flexible features such as contract authoring, workflow and version tracking. Supercharge your contract lifecycle management methods now with a free demo of leading, AI powered cloud-based software from Four Business Solutions.
About Four
Four helps small and multi-national organisations enrich the way they work. From supply chain to procurement and contract management, we have decades of experience helping companies forge ahead in the global market.
John O’Brien is the CEO at Four Business Solutions, global business consultants and software integrators providing business processes improvements in Finance, Supply Chain and Operations, across a broad range of industries.