Healthcare Contract Lifecycle Management: 5 Benefits of CLM Software

While no industry was spared the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic downtown, the healthcare industry is bearing the brunt of an already-overstretched system not entirely equipped to handle the challenge. Prior to the pandemic, healthcare organizations in the U.S. were already facing rising costs, more complex insurance and regulatory requirements, as well as ongoing pressure to modernize and create more patient-centric healthcare experiences.

2020 and 2021 are showing how valuable time is to these organizations, and it accelerated digital transformation initiatives for healthcare payers, providers and life sciences organizations hoping to modernize processes, improve operational efficiency and stay compliant. In fact, according to a recent PWC Report, “Top Health Industry Issues: Will a Shocked System Emerge Stronger?” 94% of life science executives and 86% of provider executives said specifically that improving supply chain transparency was a top priority. Deloitte’s, “2021 Global Health Care Outlook: Accelerating industry change” report also noted that “digital transformation can help individual healthcare organizations and the wider health ecosystem improve ways of working, expand access to services, and deliver a more effective patient and clinician experience.”

Clearly, there is an appetite to increase transparency and modernize, but where to start? Healthcare contract lifecycle management (CLM) provides an opportunity for healthcare organizations to begin by replacing inefficient, manual, and document-centric, processes with more dynamic, digital, automated, and streamlined ones while optimizing data they already have.

5 Benefits of Healthcare Contract Lifecycle Management Software

In healthcare, contracts are integral to employment, care transfer, technology licensing, experimental treatments, confidentiality, and telehealth, among others, and the average organization might have thousands of contracts covering multiple departments and facilities, as well as payers, providers, business associates and other third parties. The manual approaches to contract management that many healthcare organizations currently use, largely centered around shared drives and spreadsheets, are not only highly inefficient (and therefore high cost) but can also put organizations at risk. That’s because they increase the chance of contracts being mismanaged, often fail to enforce and increase regulatory and business process compliance, result in missed deadlines and other key obligations and make audit trails difficult to track and maintain.

Using modern contract management software for healthcare contract management delivers tremendous business benefits. Here are five of the big ones:

1.Reducing Cost and Complexity

Processing and managing contracts with payers, providers, and suppliers such as BAAs and Physician Participation Agreements is increasingly challenging without the right tools. Healthcare-related contracts are only becoming more complex to create, negotiate, execute, and manage throughout the contract lifecycle. The process of managing various physician and service agreements, along with regulatory compliance standards and other state and federal regulations is time-consuming and costly. Healthcare contract lifecycle management software replaces manual processes and paper documents with a digital and automated solution, resulting in greater efficiencies and greater responsiveness and agility over time.

2. Minimizing Risk

The automation and execution of bulk actions like alerts and workflows help eliminate missed renewals and other important dates and obligations. Healthcare organizations can easily create, track, and reconcile fee schedules and other administrative functions. Having a reliable, centralized, and dynamic solution to manage all these functions and alerts reduces the risk of something being overlooked as well as alleviating the burden of managing contracts on staff.

3. Ensuring Better Collaboration

Even simple healthcare contracts can involve multiple parties and multiple versions, with limited visibility into the review process. Healthcare contract lifecycle management software allows organizations to collaborate and negotiate contracts in real-time, simultaneously reviewing, approving, marking up documents, and ultimately executing them electronically. In addition to making the overall process more efficient, real-time time CLM collaboration capabilities (like Contract Logix’s Collaboration Room) allow healthcare organizations to capture all edits and comments throughout the negotiation process, providing a complete engagement history as well as an audit trail.

4. Demonstrating Compliance

Ensuring compliance with HIPAA, HITECH, JCAHO, Stark Law, Medicare billing, and other regulatory and security requirements is no easy feat, especially when it involves legal agreements. Healthcare contract lifecycle management software helps healthcare organizations manage all compliance requirements, from the initial drafting of agreements through the execution and post-execution phases of contracts. In addition, reporting on all of the required compliance data can be done in a matter of seconds.

5. Optimizing Processes

A data-driven approach to healthcare contract management gives healthcare organizations valuable and accurate insights into the bottlenecks holding up contract negotiations, and the ability to improve the workflow process for greater efficiency. This gives them the agility to respond effectively to situations as they come up. By automating and streamlining CLM processes with healthcare contract lifecycle management software, organizations can conduct business faster and positively impact their bottom line.

Takeaway

As healthcare contracts become more complicated, the tools to manage them need to keep pace. Healthcare contract lifecycle management software provides a centralized and digital foundation for modern contract management with an integrated set of tools to handle all the tasks associated with healthcare contract creation, negotiation, execution, and management – including post-execution rights, obligations, and reviews.

Contract Logix is a longtime innovator, developer and provider of healthcare contract management software and has worked with many healthcare organizations to automate and streamline their contract management. If your organization is still using a manual approach to contract management, or if you are looking for a better solution, we encourage you to schedule a live healthcare CLM demonstration of our powerful yet easy-to-use platform to see how we can help.

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