Ecteon
The Contract Management Specialist

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 payer groups, and physician service providers all come together in contracting processes. Just as a patient with a heart condition requires an expert cardiologist instead of a general practitioner, similarly, healthcare organizations need seasoned, industry-specialized solutions to manage their critical agreement provisions and regulatory agreement compliance. Having been in the healthcare contract management business for over 30 years, New York-based Ecteon has developed easy to use and affordable contract management software, named Contraxx that empowers healthcare organizations to manage the complete Contract Lifecycle from one Enterprise-wide solution effortlessly. “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.

Ecteon’s contract management solutions offer a full array of process automation management, timely alerts, language standards, negotiation, and collaboration features. Furthermore, the solution also creates a structured process that fits well with the information-based culture of healthcare by configuring every solution to individual company information needs. Regulatory change leading to increased contracting cycle time can lead to loss of revenue and profitability. With automation and improved policy control, contracting cycle time is reduced with dramatic step-change improvement.

The software platform includes a robust API infrastructure built to integrate the central role of contracting with other enterprise systems. The company also offers an implementation program with training for customer administrators, so each customer has local control for adjusting the software for future policy and process changes. Contraxx Contract Management ensures timely and accurate visibility, with task alerts for the responsible party for each contracting step at precisely the right time needed. Since healthcare data must be protected under HIPAA rules and may be sensitive, the software includes a role-based security profile system to determine who can view or change data elements, and every change is recorded in an audit trail. “There are some elements of the contract that may only be made visible to authorized persons,” explains Eckerstrom.

The company has recently launched a new Artificial Intelligence module known as “Exxtractor”, which has increased decision support for contract managers in contract negotiation stages by tracking and alerting the negotiating principle regarding company policy for preferred, acceptable, and unacceptable contract language. “Our AI feature greatly facilitates a company’s policy adherence and oversight to risk elements during the contracting process,” adds Eckerstrom.

Being in the industry for several years, Ecteon has earned a place in the ‘mission-critical’ category of several partnered healthcare institutions. Their long list of industry-leading customers includes Kaiser Permanente, where Ecteon provides healthcare document regulatory filing tracking and document package assembly across dozens of state-specific processes. This is just one example of an innovative core-solution extension which resulted in a tremendous reduction of language filing errors, step-change improvement in cycle time, and much lower labor cost, all of which are routinely delivered as Contraxx Contract Management achieved benefits by Ecteon customers.

Ecteon is the epitome of a software solutions provider when it comes to developing long term customer relationships and is proud to aspire to be considered a mission-critical solution providing partner. As part of maintaining those long term relationships, the company is continuing to invest steadily in the further development of its contract management software and its artificial intelligence engine to keep up with the rapidly changing environments faced by its healthcare customers.