NIHD’s Compliance Officer (CO), who is responsible for all contracts and outsourced legal spend, faced challenges managing contracts across the District’s 20-year-old document repository.

For a hospital system like NIHD, every minute wasted and dollar spent is time and money that could be used to improve patient outcomes. The CO knew there had to be a better way to manage and analyze contracts so the lean team could make better use of their resources, easily demonstrate compliance with critical requirements, and empower the broader organization to manage budgets and surface opportunities to improve expenditures.

The CO’s contract lifecycle management research led her to two leading solutions: Evisort’s contract intelligence platform and a healthcare-specific operations software provider. Intent on finding a provider that delivered on its promises, she insisted on a live proof of concept from each.

“We uploaded 26 of our least decipherable documents—like the 1948 Board Resolution that established our district—and I watched Evisort’s AI process them in seconds, populating data for common terms and key provisions,” she said. “We invited our accounting and finance partners for a follow-up demo, and they were equally impressed.”

With that validation, NIHD was confident that Evisort would best serve their needs. “It was clear that our savings from using Evisort would well exceed the cost of the software, which made it easy to build a compelling business case with our CFO,” said the CO.

As the first order of business, NIHD set up Evisort to align with their internal reporting and budgeting structure so that stakeholders can easily find the contracts they are responsible for and estimate potential savings or increasing costs. “We used Evisort’s AI to create a field for all of the cost centers – like radiology or cardiology – that appear in our general ledger, so now every contract has a cost center and person responsible. This lets us more accurately forecast spend to make  better use of every dollar,” the CO explained.

Since implementing Evisort, NIHD has built six contract workflows, for amendments, medical staff services,  1099 physician agreements, business associate agreements (BAAs), termination agreements, and miscellaneous contracts. “Our stakeholders love Evisort’s easy intake form, and I love that my email inbox receives  far fewer contract inquiries,” the CO reported.

She added, “With Evisort, I’m saving at least an  hour every day on contract-related work. Now,  we can turn a contract around in just a few hours—instead of a few days—to operate faster and with  greater confidence.”

As a remote hospital, NIHD has several specialist physicians who perform services just a few days per month. These physicians are paid for each travel day and reimbursed for certain travel expenses. "Previously, we’d review physician payment contracts as best we could, but it would take a lot of time to ensure our providers were not reimbursed over the contractual limits," said the CO. “Everything adds up when you’re in a critical financial position. Now, with Evisort, we can cross-reference physicians’ expenses with their contractual entitlements to make sure we don’t pay above our obligations.

With Evisort, the NIHD team is now proactively managing contracts and is never surprised by an auto-renewal or termination date. “We’ve appreciated a significant amount of savings by reviewing all contracts in Evisort to make sure they are terminated appropriately,” said the CO. “Previously, our district has had to pay substantial sums to settle termination disputes. Now, with Evisort’s AI, we can avoid termination disputes altogether.”

Previously, showing compliance with accounting principles set forth by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) 87 (lease classification) required tedious manual search for contracts by filename. With Evisort’s customizable AI, NIHD has streamlined audit preparation. Today, the accounting team can run a simple search to surface contracts that require reporting under GASB 87 for external financial audits without having to manually comb through agreements. This helps NIHD avoid any possibility of lower bond agency ratings, increased borrowing costs, or loss of public confidence.