What is contract management in the context of the healthcare industry? What steps, tasks, and requirements are involved? What does your organization need to do to maintain proper healthcare contract management processes? What tools can your organization use to centralize and streamline healthcare contract management?
Read on to discover how to take advantage of effective contract management in healthcare with leading contract management software.
What Is Contract Management in Healthcare?
Contract management in healthcare involves contract lifecycle management (CLM), from requests to renewals, including electronic signatures. Healthcare organizations must be able to oversee industry-specific compliance and regulations (such as HIPAA and others). Healthcare contract management also involves governance over HIPAA BAAs (business associate agreements), physician agreements, protected health information (PHI), and other crucial facets of healthcare contracts.
An efficient contract management solution and process can benefit healthcare providers, managed care organizations (MCOs), patients, insurance providers, hospitals, employees, and vendors alike.
Manage Healthcare Contracts Better
Healthcare contract management with divorced processes – such as paper-based storage, emails, shared drives, spreadsheets, and wet signatures – can be disastrous. It can reduce contract lifecycle management efficiency, increase damaging risk factors, and stall your organization within a confused and compromised state.
Your organization can leverage leading healthcare contracts management systems to quickly, accurately, and efficiently execute healthcare contracts. As a result, better care can be provided to patients, operational costs can be decreased, your organization can be more sure of adherence to compliance, and risk can be reduced!
Let's examine some leading healthcare contract management tools to boost your healthcare contract management software ROI.
Centrally Track Rebates & Growth Opportunities
Leading healthcare contract management software can allow your organization to maximize rebate incentives and timelines.
Your organization can track and manage rebates related to contract records by configuring user-defined data sub-tables to punctually track rebate information such as rebate amounts, dates received, and statuses. Additionally, your team can track line items such as items, quantities, cost per unit, and more (for example, IV bags, medical equipment, laboratory products, or personal protective equipment (PPE).
Relevant electronic documents can be uploaded and stored with contracts and other files and attachments for a centralized healthcare contract management experience!
Say, for example, you have a contract for medical equipment that stipulates that for every 1000 IV bags purchased, there is a $10 rebate. Price cost tables and sub-tables can be leveraged, purchases can be reported on, and alerts can be configured for those thresholds.
The automation of rebate fulfillment tracking with healthcare contract management software can help increase confidence that contracts' comprehensive value and intent are realized.
Healthcare Contract Financials Tracking
Reputable healthcare contract management software can equip your contract managers with robust contract financials tracking. Contract managers can analyze detailed audit trails, oversee contract spend against allotted budgets, centralize vendor line items, and more.
A user-defined contract categories table within healthcare contract management software can host your organization's listing of general ledger (GL) codes. As such, your organization can document GL codes associated with a particular contract on a tidy contract record page. These GL codes can include assets, liabilities, expenses, revenue, allocations, and other GL codes your organization wants to neatly track.
Comprehensive Healthcare Contract Lifecycle Management & More
Trusted healthcare-industry source-to-contract lifecycle management systems can centralize the CLM process from requests to renewals while seamlessly integrating relevant eProcurement and vendor management processes. Automated contract requests, intelligent contract authoring, web-based contract negotiations, electronic contract approvals, speedy eSignatures, and robust post-execution contract management tools can take away the headache from healthcare contract management.
A Secure Healthcare Contract Repository
A leading-edge healthcare management contract software provider that is SOC 1, SOC 2, HITRUST, HIPPA, and Privacy Shield compliant - such as CobbleStone Contract Insight®, for example, can help digitally and securely centralize healthcare contract storage. As such, your organization can decrease risk and maintain trust with counterparties, vendors, and other key stakeholders. HIPAA BAAs (business associate agreements), managed services contracts, care transfer agreements, and other industry-specific contracts can be:
- neatly categorized.
- have data easily extracted.
- tidied with contract data field mapping.
- and remain easily searchable down to the document, field, and even search term or word level.
Seamless contract data merging with HIPAA templates and other relevant contract templates can make healthcare industry contract processes faster and easier.
For the storage and protection of sensitive data, your organization can select data points and configure healthcare contract management system rules based on contract types. This is helpful because healthcare contract and vendor data can be consolidated and easily navigable - allowing your system users to establish rules regarding protected health information (PHI), dates, locations, monetary values, personally identifiable information, payment card information, and other key data for a particular healthcare contract.
Time spent on tedious data import analysis can be reduced. As such, your healthcare contract management resources can spend more time making data-driven decisions for improved healthcare contract lifecycle management.
Healthcare Contract Workflow Automation
You can utilize healthcare contract management workflow automation to decrease healthcare CLM bottlenecks by connecting the right resources at the right time with virtually unlimited task notifications and contract reminders. Workflows can be configured on a rules-based sentiment according to your organization's needs. Contract workflow automation tools can help track the many phases of the contract lifecycle.
AI-based healthcare contract management software - such as CobbleStone® contract software built on VISDOM® AI, for example, can enable your team to anticipate crucial milestones and key dates with automated alerts. Your contract managers can track up-to-date contract modifications with detailed audit trails.
Electronic signature software - such as CobbleStone's IntelliSign® - can speed up the signing process. This eSignature optimization can revolutionize your internal employee policy signing processes, your provider and contractor signing process, and other industry-relevant signing needs. Furthermore, signatories and stakeholders can use digital signatures that validate a signature's signing date and that it was untampered with - decreasing the need for a licensed notary.
Automated healthcare contract management workflow can help you focus more on healthcare contract performance management than contract task management.
Healthcare Contract Compliance
Your healthcare contract managers can utilize future-minded source-to-contract auditing tools to oversee ranging compliance standards – including HIPAA, HITRUST, and OFAC – to manage risk variables in virtually record time. This can prove helpful when assessing vendors and employees against OFAC's national sanctions list.
Supercharge Healthcare Contract Management Today!
Don't waste any more time with risky, outdated, time-consuming, and error-prone healthcare contract management. Instead, leverage the only solution that offers the healthcare contract management features mentioned above to manage contracts efficiently, virtually ensure compliance, and minimize contract risks. That solution is CobbleStone Contract Insight. See these healthcare contract software tools in action by booking your free demo with a CobbleStone Contract Insight expert today!
*Legal Disclaimer: This article is not legal advice. The content of this article is for general informational and educational purposes only. The information on this website may not present the most up-to-date legal information. Readers should contact their attorney for legal advice regarding any particular legal matter.
This blog was originally published on June 7, 2022 and updated on April 17, 2024.
