How Healthcare Organizations can Implement a CLM System

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If there’s one crucial lesson COVID-19 taught us, it’s that industries can find more efficient, effective, and electronic ways to offer their products and services to customers. Physical processes involve risks, such as minimal social distancing and increased chances of spreading COVID-19. 

While applicable to the business sector, how does electronic efficiency and effectiveness positively impact the healthcare sector to ensure more patient- and provider-centric healthcare?

Enter contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems. They empower medical institutions to digitize manual processes such as physical documentation, contract-signing, and record-keeping. A CLM system organizes all online documents, cross-references similarities, and optimizes the data via streamlining.

Here are five benefits of a CLM system:

1. It Reduces Risks Between Providers and Patients

Documentation of a patient’s admittance, records, and release involves physical touchpoints. Nurses talk to the patients (or vice versa), hand them a pen to sign, then bring those documents to a station where the papers are processed and recorded.

The exact process applies during a patient’s discharge. A patient’s family member pays through the accounting department, where physical money is exchanged. Aside from there being room for error in between, there is minimal to no physical distancing, increasing the risk of COVID-19 infection.

These administrative functions can be easily tracked with a CLM system. All necessary data is centralized, thereby limiting physical contact only when needed.

2. It Reduces Costs and Complications

As mentioned in the first benefit, human involvement means human error in-between transactions, whether due to fatigue or an overload of patients. A CLM system reduces these complications by streamlining all data in one portal so that healthcare providers and patients can refer to information there instead of with each other.

Automation also reduces costs brought about by lapsed contracts, payments, and emergency protocols during a sudden COVID-19 infection due to physical contact.

3. It Improves Collaboration

A CLM system unites all a healthcare institution’s departments through one portal to access relevant data, documents, and records. This unity and transparency empower them to collaborate further so that all information is aligned. 

As a result, teams can work more independently, with clarity, and with safety. 

4. It Streamlines Compliance

One of a healthcare organization’s most important processes is to comply with the following security protocols:

  • HIPAA
  • HITECH
  • JCAHO
  • Stark Law
  • Medicare billing

These contracts enable a hospital to run smoothly without being questioned on its day-to-day processes. Physical monitoring could lead to human error, resulting in lapses in fulfilling requirements, which lead to additional costs and complications.

A CLM system eliminates those problems by safekeeping all documents and managing them from drafting, approving, and monitoring each compliance agreement. As a bonus, it can also generate system reports for better tracking and accountability.

5. It Maximizes Processes

Think of a CLM system as an electronic administrative assistant that empowers healthcare staff to focus on what’s most important: taking care of patients. They will no longer be burdened with managing a patient’s health along with their financial statements, personal documents, and other data that the system can handle.

Staff also no longer need to physically monitor compliance contracts on a regular basis as the CLM system tracks the entire process and updates when renewals or renegotiations are up. 

Streamlining the aforementioned administrative tasks will make a world of difference for staff and patients alike. Business and healthcare will be conducted in a faster, more efficient way.

Final Thoughts

The key to understanding new technology is first to examine how and why it works. Only then can you appreciate its benefits. And while it may take some time for your organization to adapt to these changes, the growing pains are worth the minimized costs, complications, and losses brought about by human error.

So how can your healthcare organization implement a CLM system? By getting in touch with us here at Anapact for a free demo! Our solutions automate document approval workflow and make the most of your contract management software.

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- About the Author

Louis Balla
Louis Balla
Louis is the Co-Founder of Anapact and partner at Nuage, a top rated ERP consulting firm based in Venice Beach, California.