Taking on Healthcare Contract Management During the COVID Crisis

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    CobbleStone Software can improve contract management during the COVID-19 crisis.

    Manual healthcare contract management processes can increase cost and liability, leak and decrease revenue, and bring about negative patient and personnel experiences.  Outdated strategies can prevent a seamless contract lifecycle, compliance, the best use of time and resources, unified and secured documents, efficiently and accurately entered data, and the management of contracts of varying value and complexity.  Luckily, future-minded contract lifecycle management software can help. Here’s how.

    The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new challenges to healthcare contract management processes while highlighting many pre-existing process inefficiencies.  As of late, healthcare organizations and large health systems are facing ever-thinning margins.  This situation has brought with it an industry-wide shift away from fee-for-service contracting models to value-based, complex contracting models and reimbursement structures.  Despite this, most organizations still rely on manual approaches to manage thousands of payer contracts, vendor contracts, provider contracts, and more.  Do not fall behind with a stagnant healthcare contract lifecycle management process.  Step into the future of healthcare contract management with a solution that supports organizations through both stable and unpredictable times.

    Leverage a Secure Contract Repository

    Healthcare organizations and health systems must manage various documents for contracts, employees, vendors, and more.  What’s more, events such as the COVID-19 crisis and the increase of remote work have rendered manual document storage methods virtually obsolete.  As such, a unified and digital contract storage system is needed.

    Thankfully, leading contract management software offers a web-enabled repository.  This secure repository can help healthcare organizations organize and store contracts safely, retain document version control, locate contracts quickly, collaborate, track approval statuses, and much more.

    Contract storage is not defined merely by the locations in which healthcare systems and organizations store contracts and documents.  Contract storage is an opportunity for organizations to have contracts work on their behalf.  When organizations leverage a secure, centralized contract repository proffered by leading-edge healthcare contract management software, they equip themselves with the right tools to reinvigorate their contract management practices.

    Search, Report, & Track

    Reliable healthcare contract management software can give organizations many contract tracking tools for improved contract analytics, reporting, and financials tracking.

    Comprehensive audit trails can assist health systems with tracking software login attempts, contract data changes, and healthcare contract viewing attempts.  These audit logs include time and date stamps and information on users who have performed these tasks.  Audit trails give healthcare contract managers greater control and oversight over contract lifecycles, including employee task performance.  View the video below for a rapid overview of cutting-edge contract management software functionality.

     

    For comprehensive spend management, contract management software users can utilize contract pricing and contract budget tracking tools.  Healthcare organizations can track and monitor line items (such as medical equipment, medications, laboratory items, face masks and other PPE, food, and more) and vendor-related costs.  From there, comprehensive financial reports can be run.  Organizations can receive budget alerts to stay abreast of key dates using vendor management tools.

    Contract Management Reports

    Ad hoc reports give organizations user-defined status reports, reports on financial commitments, reports on upcoming tasks, and more.  These reports can be quickly exported as MS Word documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs.

    An online report designer interface allows healthcare organizations to configure report layouts to display important information.  Online report designers can include various exportation options – including MS Word, spreadsheets, PDFs, rich text, CSV, a myriad of image formats, and more!

    Executive graphical dashboards can give a detailed overview of key dates, activities, and contract performance.

    CobbleStone Software features a contracts KPI dashboard.

    With the comprehensive tracking of financials and searching and reporting tools, healthcare networks, systems, and organizations can keep track of contract data changes, spending, and payments on a fully web-enabled interface.

    Improve Compliance Management

    Future-minded compliance auditing and reporting provide healthcare organizations with visibility into contractual relationships across many businesses and entities.  Legal, HIPAA, regulatory, and other healthcare compliance standards can be easily adhered to thanks to user-friendly and robust key dates, reporting metrics, and renewal requirements.

    Advanced healthcare contract management software can also integrate with OFAC search databases.  This compliance functionality checks employee, vendor, and company data against OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) search entries found by the contract management software system within OFAC’s national sanctions lists.  This provides critical risk analysis snapshots at a glance for companies, vendors, and employees.  As such, organizations can maintain full compliance even in unforeseen circumstances such as those that have arisen from COVID-19.

    Implement Workflow Automation

    Healthcare systems and organizations should swap out error-prone, manual, and time-consuming contract management processes in favor of intelligent workflow automation.

    With the help of nearly unlimited contract notifications, task reminders, and automated alerts, workflow automation can cut contract lifecycle bottlenecks by keeping the right people in the know at the right time.  Intelligent automated workflow can transform healthcare contract management processes in the office or on the go thanks to robust and user-friendly features such as contract process management, the full audit trails mentioned above, reporting and analytics tools, user-defined fields, and much more.

    Automated contract workflows that help healthcare organizations and systems in tracking all contract lifecycle stages can enhance negotiations and approval oversight.  It can help organizations meet key dates and milestones – through and including contract renewals – thanks to automated alerts.

    With a workflow-backed, supportive, fully web-enabled, and intuitive healthcare contract management software solution, organizations can easily transition to an organized procedure that improves employee accountability and vendor management while extracting more value from contracts.

    Manage the Full Contract Lifecycle

    Healthcare contract lifecycle management software can centralize and automate the management of contracts, agreements, vendors, obligations, and committals from requests through renewals.  Key dates and alert notifications, contract data field tracking, intelligent contract writing, contract review, contract tracking, and risk management tools are all ingredients for a contract lifecycle process that provides health systems and organizations with a comprehensive view of contracts so that essential aspects do not go overlooked.  A user-friendly interface and seamless integration with various mission-critical applications result in high user adoption rates as well as rapid time-to-value.

    Leading-edge healthcare contract management software allows health systems and organizations to leverage an AI-based contract management process for comprehensive contract and vendor management in the office or on the go and during normal and abnormal times, including tools such as:

    • intelligent automated contract requests.
    • Intelligent contract writing with pre-approved clauses and templates from an organization’s dynamic, pre-approved library.
    • an online contract negotiations.
    • expedited approvals with online approval collaboration.
    • user-friendly electronic signatures for easy document collaboration and short send-to-sign times.
    • full post-execution contract management for compliance, obligations, and renewals.

    Healthcare systems and organizations should leverage the assistance of credible source-to-contract management software that can save time, save money, reduce delays, and allocate resources most effectively.

    Transform Healthcare Contract Management

    It’s time to let go of contract management processes that decreases value, increases risk, suffers delays, wastes time, fails to keep teams organized, and leaves organizations stranded during uncertain times.  It’s time to embrace a future-minded approach to healthcare contract management.  That approach should be the use of CobbleStone Software’s acclaimed source-to-contract management suite – Contract insight®.

    For over 20 years, CobbleStone has been providing industry-leading and widely celebrated contract management software solutions to many industries – including healthcare.  Contract Insight is a web-enabled, flexible, low-friction, and robust solution that has helped thousands of users in small and large organizations throughout both the public and private sectors.  Request a free demo today to learn more.

    Make your case for contract management software. Download your guide now.

    Published: 11/4/20
    Sean Heck

    Written by Sean Heck

    Sean Heck is Content Marketing Manager at CobbleStone Software

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