TractManager
Boosting Pandemic-Stricken Bottom Lines With Strategic Contract Lifecycle Management

The financial realities of COVID-19 are going to hit health systems and hospitals like a tsunami. Heroic responses to an unprecedented, generational disease have saved untold lives while simultaneously cratering bottom lines. As organizations grapple with these competing realities and pivot toward clinical and financial success in the future, they’ll need tools and insights to make this pivot successful.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions can be the backbone for enterprise stabilization. By maximizing the capabilities of Contract Lifecycle Management solutions, health systems can fully assess their business obligations, make informed cost-reduction decisions, rationalize duplicative vendors, and establish a sound operating model for financial and vendor management in the future. These capabilities will bear significant value to organizations whose cost-reduction strategies follow a common “playbook” for recovery.

Responding to the population-health threats posed by the virus, health systems mobilized into action to curtail the further incidence and spread of COVID-19. Clinical teams deployed new care management procedures, Supply Chain teams ramped up the purchase of essential supplies, and administrative teams adopted a remote-based working model to continue business-as-usual activities.

The compounding effect of these decisions, however, is that in a relatively short period of time costs increased significantly, and revenues dropped dramatically. As a result, already-thin operating margins plunged deeply into the red.

A general guideline in healthcare management is that it’s easier to remove expenses than to generate new revenue. Because the inputs to revenue generation—people, capital, and infrastructure — are often fixed during a period of time, administrators can “trim the excess” in operations as a first step to shoring up cash.

This approach makes sense on paper but is often difficult to execute in reality. Why? Because the essential assets for making informed cost-cutting decisions — contracts — are often decentralized across a health system. Without full visibility into an organization’s business obligations, executives and managers can neither accurately assess the opportunities for cost reductions nor appreciate the implications to the clinical and administrative teams dependent on those vendors.

At TractManager, we address this challenge and offer health systems the leading CLM solution in the market. Our healthcare-specific software platform, MediTract CLM, provides complete transparency into contract assets across an enterprise, and our AI-enabled capabilities proactively identify opportunities for cost reduction and risk mitigation. Moreover, recognizing the remote-based working arrangements many of us have today, the configurable workflows ensure the right person is reviewing the right contract at the right time, no matter where he or she is. As a result, productivity soars and engagement across department and clinical lines increases tenfold.

The importance of a sound CLM solution is quickly coming into the spotlight. Over the next several quarters (and possibly longer), organizations will deploy concerted, multi-phased cost-reduction strategies to buttress their operating margins.

Our healthcare-specific software platform, MediTract CLM, provides complete transparency into contract assets across an enterprise, and our AI-enabled capabilities proactively identify opportunities for cost reduction and risk mitigation.

As they go through their cost-cutting “playbooks,” CLM solutions will play an active role in each step of the process. These platforms will be the backbone for attaining value and achieving cost-reduction mandates.

Two Phases of Recovery

Organizations will deploy two mutually exclusive strategies from a “playbook” to achieve financial stabilization.

Play #1: As part of this “play,”health systems will identify and execute spend reduction initiatives that have both immediate and long-term cost implications. To this end, the AI-enabled capabilities of Meditract CLM can proactively comb through a contract database, categorize contracts by vendors and other considerations, and surface those insights to leaders for evaluation. Thereafter, utilizing a transparent workflow, managers can review the necessity, efficacy, and value of these relationships to determine whether they should be consolidatedor eliminated.

Play #2: Organizations will optimize operations to minimize waste in value chains. As part of this effort, an enterprise will standardize operating models that align people to process to minimize waste. With CLM, health leaders can deploy a technology backbone that embeds people-to-process models in a secure, transparent environment, delivering accountability, productivity, and engagement. Real-time performance analytics and workflow functionalities ensure rogue activities are eliminated and expensive resources “operate at the top of their license.”

A Path Forward

Contract assets are at the heart of an organization’s business and financial operations. Centralizing these assets in a common location, standardizing the processes associated with managing them, and optimizing the value of contracts to support spend-reduction and risk-mitigation efforts post-COVID are the bedrock of financial stabilization.

At TractManager, we have the people and the software to ensure that healthcare organizations weather current financial challenges successfully. Our CLM solution is the gold standard in the marketplace, and our contract experts have more than 30 years of industry experience. We partner with organizations to achieve their unique objectives with measurable results, ensuring they are positioned for short-term as well as long-term success.