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In Good Health: How Evisort Helped Care Initiatives Tame Decades of Contracts using AI

July 26, 2022
Care Initiatives, Iowa’s largest not-for-profit skilled nursing and long-term care provider, had multiple decades of contracts stored in different locations. They turned to Evisort to centralize their contracts and turn them into usable, mineable data.

Since 1989, Care Initiatives, Iowa’s largest not-for-profit skilled nursing and long-term care provider, has been providing healthcare to patients and residents through all of life’s health transitions. Care Initiatives owns and operates more than 50 locations around Iowa, including nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and hospice offices. Until recently, however, their team had never utilized a centralized contract management system.

Stepping into contract chaos

When Abhay Nadipuram started as Care Initiatives’ first-ever general counsel in November 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, he faced a monumental challenge. He had to quickly get a handle on the thousands of legacy contracts he had inherited, review and analyze new contracts that were coming in, and start a legal team from scratch, all at the same time.

“My first priority was getting up to speed and understanding the landscape, seeing what our legal exposure was, and our risk exposure was,” Nadipuram said during a recent Evisort webinar.

It wasn’t an easy task. Contracts were housed on different servers in disparate locations. When Nadipuram wanted to look over a contract, the Care Initiatives team wasn’t always able to quickly pull up or even locate the most up-to-date version of the agreement. Nadipuram worried that Care Initiatives was potentially missing renewal deadlines, putting them at risk of getting stuck with auto-renewing contracts they no longer needed, or facing a disruption to important services.

On top of that, Care Initiatives didn’t have a standard system for contract approval and execution. “We didn’t know who was signing contracts or who had the authority to sign them,” Nadipuram said.

Meanwhile, Care Initiatives’ nurses and administrators were on the front line dealing with the effects of COVID. The health of patients and residents — not the health of Care Initiatives’ contracts — was top of mind for their leadership.

Turning to contract intelligence

Nadipuram knew that Care Initiatives needed to invest in technology that would provide visibility into their vast portfolio of legacy and current contracts. In order to analyze, understand, and renegotiate the organization’s contracts, Nadipuram and his newly assembled legal team needed to be able to quickly scan thousands of agreements for key data points, such as indemnification clauses and rights to terminate.

When they saw Evisort’s cloud-based, AI-powered Contract Intelligence Platform in action, Nadipuram and his team learned how Evisort could:

Ingest documents easily.

Especially in the middle of a pandemic, Care Initiatives administrators did not have hundreds of excess hours to spend on the phone with IT support, struggling to put their contracts in a new system. Evisort integrated easily with Care Initiatives’ existing file-sharing software, and uploading from hard drives was equally quick and simple. All staff had to do was drag and drop files to get them synced or uploaded into Evisort’s secure, accessible platform.

Scan thousands of contracts quickly and accurately.

Nadipuram was impressed by the speed and accuracy with which Evisort's proprietary AI scanned and pulled relevant data and clauses from all of the organization’s current and legacy contracts. Within just hours, Evisort uploaded and fully indexed thousands of contracts, creating the sort of valuable, mineable data Nadipuram needed to understand the scope of Care Initiatives’ commitments and exposures.

Help enforce consistent contracting practices.

Evisort’s customizable workflows enabled the creation of standardized approval chains. With Evisort, at every stage, the team could see which part of a contract needed review, when, and by whom.

Enable seamless access.

Ease of access was important to Care Initiatives staff. Nadipuram liked that Evisort was a cloud-based platform. If he or another team member needed to access a specific contract while they were away from the office, they could easily pull it up from their home computer or smartphone using a secure login.

This streamlined access was especially important, because in the nursing home industry, regulators and certificate agencies stop by sporadically to assess compliance or investigate complaints. They often ask to see specific contracts with minimal warning.

Thanks to Evisort, an administrator could pull up the requested contract quickly — or, at worst, call Nadipuram or another team member to search for it. “That's really the beauty of the [Evisort] product right there and how we were able to judge that it was the best product for us,” Nadipuram said.

Getting up to speed

Using Evisort, Nadipuram’s newly assembled legal team was able to efficiently centralize more than thirty years of contracts into one safe, easy-to-search, accessible repository in less than half the time they originally thought it would take.

Nadipuram’s law school dean once told him that the best tool a lawyer can have is the ability to learn quickly. That’s what Evisort provided for Nadipuram and his team.

Additionally, Nadipuram appreciated the seamlessness of the Evisort onboarding process during a particularly stressful time for the healthcare industry. “Being able to have a contract management platform that's usable and workable and searchable really allows us to focus on what matters most — which is taking care of our residents and our tenants and their families,” he said.

Want to see how Evisort’s best-in-class AI can help you quickly turn your contracts into searchable data? Schedule a demo today!

Find out how

Evisort

can help your team

Test Evisort on your own contracts to see how you can save time, reduce risk, and accelerate deals.

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Find out how

Evisort

can help your team

Test Evisort on your own contracts to see how you can save time, reduce risk, and accelerate deals.