Richard Eckerstrom, CEO, Ecteon
Contracts are an essential part of business operations in all industries and healthcare is no exception.However, healthcare-related contracts are becoming increasingly complex to create and manage throughout the contract lifecycle.With challenges growing in the form of increased regulatory requirements, growing healthcare treatment options, and rising drug trial and insurance costs, it becomes difficult for healthcare providers to manually manage the ever-changing contract cycle. The onerous process of managing huge volumes of physician and service agreements, along with regulatory compliance standards is time-consuming and expensive. In fact, according to a recent study by Black Book Market Research, nearly $157 billion per year is spent by healthcare providers on manual contract management.
Thus, healthcare providers need an efficient contract management system that can reduce operating costs, assure adherence to compliance requirements, and mitigate risk while enabling them to provide the best possible care to patients. And this is precisely where Ecteon, a national leading Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software company, comes into the picture. Over the last 15 years, Ecteonhas continually refinedan easy to use and affordable contract management software solution, named Contraxx.
Contraxx is an enterprise-wide solution, that provides Ecteon’s clients with innovative and effective ways to manageall stages of contracts – from request, through to negotiation to post signature obligation management.
“Our objective is to help healthcare organizations manage the information and the financial and regulatory risk associated with these contracts, automate processes which have often been tedious or labor-intensive, and make policy and process oversight more accessible,” says Richard Eckerstrom, CEO of Ecteon.
The Incredible Journey of Ecteon
Ecteon began its journey in 1986 as a consulting company in the entertainment industry. However, during its early phase, the company discovered how the patchwork composition of contracts limits the operational efficiency and put companies at significant risk.Ecteon’s very first customer, CBS Recordsrevealed to Ecteonthe intricacies and complexities involved in contract management as it explored automation for managing contracts of some of the biggest names in the entertainment and music industry.The disparate and unorganized process of assembling, negotiating, storing, and updating the contracts inspired Ecteon tocreate an enterprise-wide, integrated software system that would enhance a customer’s legacy administrative contract processes.
In its first decade, Ecteoninvested all its resources in building custom contract management software solutions for Fortune 500 clients, focusing mainly on the entertainment industry. It worked closely with some of the largest entertainment companies including Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. Overtime, Ecteon’sContraxx software evolved into a highly configurable, browser-based platform with thegoal to manage complex contracting practices. This helped the company to attain a unique edge in the market and expand its reach to other sectors beyond the entertainment industry.Today, Ecteon serves several industries including a focus in the healthcare sector. They cater to more than 100 clients who are primarily located in the US, Canada, and the UK. Ecteonprovides services to a broad collection of midsize and large organizations with typical annual revenue ranging from $50 million to $100 billion.
Delivering Best-In-Class Contract Management Platform for Healthcare
Ecteon’s configurable contract management solutions simplify even the most complex and intricate requirements of companies in healthcare. In today’s fast changing world, practicing medicine or running healthcare operations are highly challenging. The increasing regulations, growing healthcare treatment options and costs, and the changing expectations from managed-care groups, insurance payor groups, and physician service providers all come together in contracting processes.
Ecteon’s easy-to-use platform enables their healthcare customers to stay compliant with state and federal regulations no matter how often regulations change. It includes efficient process automation management, provision library management, timely alerts, negotiation, and collaboration features. It also enforces security by ensuring timely and accurate visibility to only authorized users. “Since healthcare data may be sensitive and needs to be protected under HIPAA rules, the software has a role-based security profile system that determines who can view or change data elements, and every change is recorded in an audit trail,” explains Richard Eckerstrom.
To further empower their customers, Ecteon also delivers an implementation program with training for customer administrators. This provides customerslocal control for makingsoftware edits as future policy and process changes.
Cultivating Strong Customer Relationshipsand Healthy Work Culture
At Ecteon, trust has been a core tenet of its contract management platform from the beginning.The 30-year legacy of Contraxx and unwavering commitment of the company to implement quality solutionshelps Ecteon to harbor trust and earn a wide array of loyal clients across industry verticals.“Trust is crucial to our client partnerships due to the sensitivity of many clients’ requirements and needs especially in the healthcare industry,” asserts Richard.
In order to maintain valued and long-term relationships with its clients, the company focuses on enhancing its contract management software and AI engine to enable itshealthcare customersto keep pace with rapidly changing environments.Apart from creating satisfied clients through its value-driven service, Ecteonalso heavily focuses on fostering an empowering work culture for its employees.
“Ecteon is a 100% employee-owned private U.S. corporation, with a long-tenured and industry dedicated group of professional staff,” states Richard.
Continual Enhancements and Innovation
When it comes to the future, Ecteonhas several key strategic initiatives in its pipeline. Recently, Ecteonhas launched a new artificial intelligence language module, called Exxtractor-AI. This artificial intelligence enhancement assists contract managers in a variety of business use-cases including contract negotiation by tracking and alerting the negotiating principle of company policy for company preferred, acceptable, and unacceptable contract language.
Moving ahead, Ecteon intends to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation to further improve its platform while staying true to its principles of delivering the best solution to its customers. As a part of this plan, the company continues to upgrade its Contraxx platform with more AI-enabled use-cases, customer-specific branding and tailoring options, increased adoption of the most popular UI conventions, a mobility app, and a powerful Analytics dashboard.