Best Practices to Follow with Healthcare Contract Management Software

Healthcare Contract Management Software 101  

Medical contract management software helps to effectively manage the thousands of contracts with different vendors, individuals, and organizations in healthcare. Healthcare contract management solutions allow organizations to provide the best care services to patients, reduce operation costs, ensure compliance requirements, and mitigate risks. An efficient physician contract management software simplifies healthcare contract management by streamlining, creating, routing, reviewing, and approving contracts.   

Challenges in Managing Healthcare Contracts

1. Reliance on Manual Processes: The biggest challenge in healthcare contract solutions is the reliance on manual processes. Healthcare organizations are still reliant on manual processes including outdated software and paper-based systems. These hand-operated systems lead to inefficiencies, errors, delays, and non-compliance, and sometimes result in huge financial losses.

2. Constant Changes in Regulations: The healthcare contract management process faces significant challenges due to the constant changes in regulations, which require organizations to ensure their contracts comply with the latest requirements. Failure to do so can lead to financial penalties, legal disputes, and reputational damage.

3. Difficulty in Managing Costs: Managing costs in healthcare is daunting, and contract management for hospitals plays a pivotal role in this process. Managing healthcare contracts ensures fair and transparent pricing, negotiates favorable terms, and monitors costs throughout the contract lifespan. This helps optimize financial outcomes and deliver high-quality healthcare to patients. 

4. Several Stakeholders: Healthcare contracting involves multiple stakeholders such as healthcare providers, insurance companies, and government agencies. The involvement of multiple stakeholders leads to a communication gap and complicates the decision-making process. Teaming up with these stakeholders to draft, negotiate, review, and sign healthcare contracts is one of the biggest challenges in healthcare contract lifecycle management as this process is prone to errors.

5. Lack of Standardization: Lack of standardization is yet another barrier to efficient health contract management. Each healthcare organization has unique and distinctive contract templates, clauses, and approval processes. This lack of standardization often results in inefficiencies, errors, and inconsistencies in the medical contract management services.

Core Features of Healthcare Contract Management Software

1. Contract Drafting

Contract lifecycle management tools allow you to create contracts from scratch in Word or PDF format. They allow editing, formatting, and field drag-and-drop, and can be used as templates for quick agreement creation. A pre-approved clause library saves time and prevents any errors in copying or the usage of legally invalid language, ensuring efficient and accurate contract creation.

2. Collaboration

A contract management platform allows you to share a draft document with other team members, allowing them to track changes, add comments, and edit on the spot. Collaborators can access the same document, and all version history is tracked within it, ensuring you can always review the document and modify it as needed.

3. Approval Workflows

The CLM system allows you to create customizable approval workflows, routing each draft to specific approvers. You can also set conditional approvals, directing contracts to specific stakeholders based on certain thresholds, thereby standardizing the document review process and facilitating faster contract approval.

4. Negotiation

After a contract is approved, you can negotiate with external customers and vendors using the same document. Real-time customer and vendor comments can be viewed, and changes can be redlined for approval. Some contract management software development tools allow for internal or external comments, allowing control over which parts customers can see.

5. E-signing Integration

Medical contract software can collect unlimited legally binding e-signatures in each document, authenticating them in compliance with US and EU regulations like the ESIGN Act and eIDAS. It securely stores audit trails for future reference and allows for custom signing chains to ensure document routing to each signer in the correct sequence.

6. Automation

Contract lifecycle management software automates various tasks, such as sending contract drafts to internal approvers in a specified order, automating negotiation by sending contracts to vendors in a chosen order, and automatically sending signature requests when it’s time to sign. This streamlines the healthcare contract system development process and saves time and effort.

7. Availability of Cloud Storage

Contract management solutions eliminate the need for physical files and email attachments by storing documents securely in a cloud-based platform. These documents are accessible to any authenticated user from any approved device. They also offer features like tagging, full-text search, and optical character recognition (OCR) search, allowing team members to quickly find necessary contracts.

8. Reporting and Analytics

Contract management software for hospitals transforms contract information into analytical data, allowing for customized reports on various contract fields, filtering by date and document type. Automatic deadline reports ensure timely renewal, cancellation, or renegotiation of agreements. Additionally, a dashboard provides high-level visual insights.

Best Practices for Healthcare Contract Management

1. Standardize Your Payer Contract Management Process  

The creation and revision of contracts in healthcare can be complex and consist of different parties outside and within healthcare networks. Therefore, the process of contract management systems in healthcare must be standardized to ensure the consistent implementation of all the necessary steps.  

Since multiple medical contracts get created and transferred throughout the healthcare organization for submissions, corrections, approvals, and signatures, there is a requirement for a standardized process. It will ensure the completion of essential tasks at every step of the contract drafting. Additionally, the hospital contract manager can also minimize the mistakes and save time. 

2. Use Workflow and Process Automation  

This is the best electronic health record management practice that you cannot skip. Automation in healthcare contract management practices streamlines workflow, improves health analytics, and manages health informatics better. It speeds up the drafting and review process of contract administration in healthcare, which enhances patient engagement and healthcare business growth.  

Automated workflows send regular reminders to individuals about contract and termination dates, key obligations to be met, etc. It creates transparency in healthcare management and manages efficient contract creation and revision.  

3. Link Contracts to Policies and Procedures  

Medical contract management solutions are about regulatory compliance and adherence to strict security and privacy guidelines. Healthcare organizations need to manage medical billing solutions and patient medical records and ensure HIPAA compliance. Policies/procedures are integrated with healthcare contract management software.   

A proficient healthcare payer contract management software potentially links every contract to relevant procedures and policies, ensuring smooth integration from a compliance point of view. That is why providers need to adopt electronic contract management in healthcare and a policy management system. 

4. Create a Database of Commonly Used Contracts and Legal Clauses  

How often does your healthcare organization deal with undistinguishable clauses in the contracts? I’m sure it is pretty often. Did you know that you can save time by adding these clauses automatically into your hospital contract management systems? Your organization’s legal team can determine which provisions are commonly used, written, and stored in your healthcare contract management solutions. Creating a database for the frequently-used legal clauses and automating them can enable you to save time. Besides this, common contracts can be converted into templates for system storage.  

5. Centralized Repository  

The healthcare industry involves a lot of paperwork daily, making efficiently organizing different files difficult. A centralized repository in hospital contract management software can help you reduce documentation. Using a healthcare contract management system, you can add custom tags and search options for locating specific folders and files, etc.  

This helps in completing tasks quickly, such as contract reviewing, and simplifying decision-making based on precise information. Healthcare contract management services enable recognizing opportunities within contracts for bond strengthening and benefit from collaborating with vendors, partners, and others. 

6. Security Optimization  

Healthcare provider contracts consist of electronic data exchange and storage. That is why high security is of prior importance for healthcare provider software solutions.   

It is crucial to ensure server compliance with required rules and regulations and set up a user hierarchy and two-factor authentication to secure healthcare contract management. Additionally, you can add digital watermarks on healthcare files to prevent unauthorized sharing.  

7. Comprehensive Reporting  

After successfully organizing your healthcare contract management software and automated alerts to meet deadlines, you must ensure effective reporting. Firms must ensure that reports reflect enhanced contract transparency and regulatory compliance. Comprehensive reporting in healthcare contract management software improves contracts’ transparency and illustrates that your healthcare organization has systems in place to address the regulations.   

Failing to report on healthcare contracts proactively can cause issues for the internal compliance team and regulations. Compliance regulations help you implement adequate systems and healthcare processes. Healthcare contract management software simplifies the creation of reports and speeds up the entire process.   

8. Integrate Contract to Policies and Procedures

Integrating important contracts into relevant policies and procedures is crucial to ensure successful contract management systems for healthcare. Hospital management contracts are essential for regulatory compliance and security, and the healthcare industry must adhere to strict guidelines to ensure privacy and security. Linking healthcare contract automation to regulatory policies helps overcome compliance issues. You should ensure that your contract management software healthcare offers comprehensive compliance offerings to help businesses adhere to industry standards. You should remember that implementing the right software will lead to successful and applicable contracts in the healthcare industry, ensuring compliance with regulatory bodies like HIPAA, False Claims, and HITECH.

Application of Healthcare Contract Management Software

Contract Management Software can:

• Assist in clinical trials, supplier contracts, research collaborations, patient agreements, and regulatory compliance. 
• Create clear responsibilities and data usage terms, and tracks agreements with suppliers and pharmaceutical companies. 
•  Negotiate intellectual property rights, manages patient consent forms, and ensures compliance with drug approvals, medical procedures, and patient data management.
• Streamline the signing of consent forms and manage treatment agreements.

Conclusion  

Implementing best practices such as automated workflows, comprehensive reporting, and a centralized repository is essential for modernizing healthcare processes, reducing risks, and ensuring compliance in healthcare contract management software. By leveraging collaboration tools, e-signature integration, and robust security measures, healthcare organizations can simplify contract creation and management. The above practices will help healthcare professionals to manage contracts more proficiently, and to improve patient care outcomes and operational performance. OSP can create custom software solutions for a healthcare contract management system that will enable you to stand on top of the competitive healthcare industry. If you need custom software solutions tailored to your organization’s needs, get in touch with our experts.