You may know all the different ways to slice pizza but do you know the four types of healthcare contract data you can slice and dice within pre- and post-signature?
“Healthcare contract”. Two simple words, yet they conjure up so many impactful, possibly costly, and foundational ideas and processes. Combine the overwhelming quantity of contracts that each healthcare organization works with, not to mention the regulations dictating how to operate, pretty soon your head can be spinning . And all we did was bring up two simple words, “healthcare contract.”
Inside those two simple words, there can be patient data, quantity discounts, doctor benefits, resolution language, payor terms, equipment costs, physician recruitment, and the list goes on. But we need to focus. Regulatory requirements, better known as laws and regulations established to safeguard patient privacy, ensure quality care, and maintain the integrity of healthcare systems, are interwoven amongst the multitude of contracts each healthcare organization deals with. A definitive study in 2017 found that health systems, hospitals, and PAC providers had to comply with 629 discrete regulatory requirements across nine domains. While there have been efforts by the federal government to bring the number of regulations under control, they have not tamed the beast: in 2021 HHS found almost 300 broken citation references in the Code of Federal Regulations, meaning regulations continue to reference others that no longer exist!
Nervous yet?
This brings us to healthcare contract data – keeping track of it, defining it, and understanding it – all for the benefit of your healthcare organization. Sadly, there’s more to it than the industry standard of ensuring that all the “i’s” are dotted, and the “t’s” are crossed in your healthcare contracts, and that they’re safely filed away. Contract data has become more than dates, numbers, and commitments that sit inside a document, locked away in a cabinet, only to be called up when thought of again – instead, it is that data is a vital piece of everyday business operations, guiding strategic decisions to achieve organizational goals. Today contract data is the connecting sinew between the different functions of any business to become the single source of truth for how to safely and profitably run the whole business.
Back to the overwhelming number of contracts, and regulations within those contracts, that any healthcare organization is responsible for. The question we hear all the time is, “How do you go from contracts in a filing cabinet to contract data becoming transformative for the entire healthcare organization?”. The answer is data-first CLM.
It’s a process that needs to be well thought out but begins with defining your data in very specific ways. You can learn from contract data what is occurring in your business relative to what should be happening, and through proper contract lifecycle management you can improve those results and reach your business goals. Of course, the hard part is putting rubber on the road and making it happen.
How to begin? Data organization.
Slicing and dicing contract data is not like making pizza slices! You aren’t arguing the comparative advantages of the traditional triangle slices versus the smaller squares that seem to be all the rage with the bougie woodfire places belching out pizzas all over the US. There is a definitive way to define contract data and a good CLM partner can help you with those tricky definitions.
It’s more than just pre- and post-signature. It’s breaking it into digestible slices (sorry – still thinking about pizza) like defining what questions each type of data answers. Your data can tell you about the effectiveness of a process (“how well?”), and equally can track actual numbers (“how many”). It can also tell you the best model clauses to follow, help you identify contracting bottlenecks, propose automation opportunities, and even probe complex “what ifs.” If you don’t have a grasp of the nuances of descriptive and dynamic data and the four types of data between them, you should. It could be the difference between being overwhelmed by the number of contracts and an exponentially growing number of regulations or taking control of your data destiny.
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