The Opportunity
Tennessee Health Management’s goal is to be the premier provider of long-term care services and a source of pride not only for our employees, but for the residents, their families and our neighbors. A critical component of THM’s plan for success is to leverage their contracts to take advantage of economies of scale when purchasing, manage the whole process of negotiating good contracts and provide a framework to evaluate all contracts to determine if they are worth continuing.
Rebecca Wells Demaree, Associate General Counsel, joined Tennessee Health Management 5 years ago as in house counsel. THM is growing rapidly (100 affiliate corporations- 50 providers & 50 Property owners) and trying to manage a large number of paper based contracts that were all on paper with no central storage location and no approval and drafting process. Her first order of business was to implement contract approval, drafting processes and gather all contracts to the corporate location while actively searching for a cloud based contract management solution. Rebecca spends a significant amount of time on the road so the review and approval of contracts was cumbersome and the affiliates had to call HQ to get contract information or have contracts sent via internal mail for audits. All contracts were stored on a single hard drive in PDF format. Jessica Redden, Contract Manager, is the central point of contact for the legal department had the monumental task of keeping the whole process moving forward. Organizing, reporting and contract management was highly manual and took up a significant amount of her time.
The Solution
After a thorough evaluation of available software solutions, THM chose UCM to help them meet their key objectives:
- Use Cloud technology to streamline processes, remove roadblocks and have on demand access from anywhere at any time
- Create a central area to store all of their contracts and associated data
- Create contract visibility for all 100 managed affiliates located throughout Tennessee
- Allow legal team to approve all contracts and track the negotiation process
- Provide timely notifications of all upcoming contract milestones like expirations, yearly contract reviews, & renewing contracts.
- Generate repeatable and ad-hoc reporting
The Results
In less than 30 days from project launch, THM was live on UCM and actively adding contracts. Their objectives were satisfied and the results were impressive:
- All contracts and supporting documents are stored centrally
- Contract access went from days to a few mouse clicks
- Time spent analyzing and reporting decreased by 50%
- Contract drafting and approval time was reduced significantly
- Affiliate audits (Required every 18 months) are fully supported, eliminating the prior requirement for printed contract binders
The implementation of UCM also paid off in a few unexpected ways due to the solutions flexibility:
- OIG vendor checks
- Used UCM for storage of due diligence checks when an affiliate was sold. Vendor lawyers were given highly limited access to documents.