Health Systems Can Look to Contracts for Untapped Savings

TractManager Outlines Ways Healthcare Organizations Can Use AI to Optimize Contract Management

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TractManager, the leader in strategic sourcing, contract lifecycle management, and provider management, today announced the public release of a white paper that demonstrates how healthcare organizations can take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions to decrease expenses and increase operating margins. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations were already struggling with declining margins. Since COVID, those margins have plummeted into the red for many, and the financial pressure has increased to unprecedented levels.

The white paper, The AI Uprising in Contract Management: You Can’t Control Your Costs if You Can’t Control Your Contracts, is authored by Patrick F. Flynn, Chief Product Officer, and Kimberly Hartsfield, Chief Data Officer. The paper illustrates how healthcare organizations can realize important cost-savings by standardizing and centralizing their contracts, and deploying AI-driven analytics to optimize the management of those contracts.

By centralizing their contracts and analyzing them with AI, healthcare organizations can take advantage of two benefits that are not possible if the work were performed manually by staff: the delivery of rapid results and a much lower error rate than is achievable by people. “The combination of speed and reliability,” the authors say, “enables organizations to identify much-needed cost savings in a timely manner to more effectively mitigate risk.”

The efficacy of using AI to analyze contracts is demonstrated in three scenarios, each of which could lead to compliance-related violations and the fines and negative publicity that accompany them: addressing contract risks—in this example, missing Business Associate Agreements (BAAs); accurately tracking physician compensation, which helps organizations reconcile changing regulations with what are often ongoing changes to their physician compensation arrangements; and complying with changing accounting standards such as lease agreements, which, if not accounted for properly, can provoke penalties and fines.

The authors caution that many vendors — from established companies to small start-ups — claim to have developed an AI-driven solution for contract management; however, not all such solutions are created equal. The white paper includes a list of eight questions that healthcare organizations can ask vendors about their product maturity to help them make a wise purchasing decision that will produce a meaningful return on investment.

Healthcare executives are invited to download the white paper here. In addition to the white paper, TractManager will publish a series of monthly blogs to help healthcare organizations improve their financial health by taking advantage of the wealth of information hidden in the data they already possess. The blog series is available on tractmanager.com throughout the remainder of 2020.

About TractManager

TractManager’s healthcare-specific application suite serves three out of five U.S. hospitals. Serving the healthcare industry with integrity for more than 30 years, TractManager is the first mover in strategic sourcing, enterprise contract lifecycle management, provider management and evidence-based data. The company’s more than 450 highly skilled and experienced professionals help clients to improve cash flows by reducing their capital and nonlabor costs and to conform their contract, policy, and procedure management to meet regulatory requirements. For more information, visit tractmanager.com.