As refining financial performance becomes more critical for healthcare organizations, tools to identify cost-saving opportunities and other ways to enhance efficiency is critical.

One area where overlooked expenses compound over time is within a healthcare organization’s contract management. These overlooked, avoidable expenses include contract consolidation opportunities, avoiding unintentional renewals, proactive contract monitoring, preventing payments on expired contracts, and more.

Implementing a robust contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution can drive measurable financial benefits across organizations, including:

  • Providing comprehensive visibility into contracts
  • Mitigating compliance risks
  • Streamlining administrative and operational workflows
  • Consolidating vendor relationship
  • Speeds up clinician onboarding to bring in revenue faster
  • And more

At Ntracts, we specifically help clients save by uncovering cost-saving opportunities through contract visibility and proactive monitoring, mitigating compliance risks, and enhancing operational efficiency to drive financial gain along with efficiency gains.

This article explores practical ways a well-integrated CLM platform can transform an organization’s contracting practices into a strategic asset for financial growth.

#1: Gain Visibility into Contract Spend

A robust CLM solution provides immediate access to quality contract data that allows organizations to make timely, informed decisions. This visibility uncovers opportunities to cut costs, such as vendor consolidation, optimizing discounts within agreements, and improving procurement practices.

Essentially, this real-time information equips financial and contracting teams with the insights they need to act swiftly and strategically – while avoiding potential setbacks.

Within Ntracts, all data is searchable and reportable making contract visibility fast, accessible, and seamless.

#2: Avoid Unintended Auto-Renewals

According to the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management, companies lose an average of 9% of annual income from contract mismanagement.

This is where CLM solutions come in. A well-integrated solution comes with built-in reminders about contract timelines, prompting timely decisions to terminate or renegotiate contracts before they renew automatically.

Rest assured that the only contracts auto-renewing are those that you’ve intended to auto-renew.

#3: Expose & Reduce Contract Overpayments

Your CLM solution should proactively notify users of upcoming milestones, such as contract expirations. This helps ensure contracts are managed efficiently and overpayments are avoided.

Paying vendors after their contracts expire not only incurs additional costs, but it also exposes the organization to regulatory risks.

Additionally, organizations can monitor for potential fraud through evaluating contractual payment terms against actual payments. Proactively reporting payment discrepancies and voluntarily disclosing evidence of potential fraud means helping to protect organizations from the financial repercussions of government-directed investigations and/or litigation.

#4: Mitigate Compliance Risks

CLM technology helps mitigate a top concern for healthcare organizations: financial risks that come with non-compliance.

The healthcare-specific CLM solution, Ntracts, is designed to ensure adherence to regulatory standards – organizational policies, vendor credentials, embedding regulatory checks, approvals, and policy references directly into the contracting process, reducing errors and ensuring audit readiness – ultimately helping healthcare organizations avoid significant fines and other penalties. This proactive approach prevents costly penalties and contract missteps, protecting the organization’s financial and reputational health.

A robust solution such as Ntracts’ CLM solution automates many of these steps, effectively reducing manual errors and significantly accelerating the contract lifecycle.

#5: Enhance Operational Efficiencies

Physician contracting is complex and requires accurate data and maintenance to ensure compliance and effective negotiations. Effective CLM solutions tackle this by streamlining and reducing legal and administrative workflows, thus accelerating clinician onboarding and speeding up revenue generation.

Automating these workflows helps eliminate human error and many time-consuming, manual, redundant tasks. Some workflows that can be automated include:

  • Contract origination
  • Review
  • Approval
  • Signature

Incorporating these automated standardized processes allows organizations to realize unique solutions to improve efficiency, resulting in significant productivity gains over time.

CLM platforms should accommodate various contract types, allowing for healthcare-specific intake forms to further streamline the process. These routine processes can be tailored specifically to an organization’s unique compliance, legal, financial, and executive policies.

Establishing a standardized workflow from contract submission to execution – and everything in between – provides macro and micro visibility into each contract. This also will inevitably expose bottlenecks within the process to be corrected, significantly improving productivity over time.

How Ntracts’ CLM Solution Maximizes Financial Impacts

As the leading CLM software for healthcare organizations across the country, the Ntracts approach to contract management provides best-in-class, healthcare-focused contract management solutions to healthcare organizations – saving them millions of dollars each year.

So, how do we do it?

Consider an example organization that onboards 20 clinicians each year. When partnering with Ntracts, the CLM solution expedites their clinician onboarding process by five days.

Applying a median patient revenue of $2,535,946 per year per clinician, this results in an additional $1,056,644 in annual ROI realized – just from accelerating the clinician onboarding process.

There are many other areas where Ntracts can create cost-savings for your healthcare organization as well.

As the Ntracts CLM solution streamlines and reduces legal, contracting, and administrative tasks, this results in saving over 3,370 hours of FTE administrative work annually. These solutions results in an annual benefit in resource impact of $113,400.

By partnering with Ntracts, this organization saved $1,200,000 annually – $4,730,000 over a five-year term.

Conclusion

For healthcare organizations, contract mismanagement can have significant impacts on the bottom line – potentially risking millions of dollars and operational necessities.

Whether it’s overpaying on expired contracts, allowing for auto-renewal of contracts that no longer serve the organization, or spending too much time on repetitive manual contracting work, these mistakes and inefficiencies compound over time with a high volume of contracts.

The reality is contract management needs to support the dynamic landscape of the healthcare system. Automation is no longer optional; it’s a basic necessity to function in today’s demanding healthcare world.

Are you interested in exploring options to optimize your healthcare contracts?

Request a demo today to see how Ntracts can help your healthcare organization save millions of dollars and thousands of hours each year.