DOI: 10.15146/r3b37b
title: Contract design thinking: a service oriented architecture SOA for contract models, maintenance and testing

description: Contract variances complicate academic medical center accounts receivables
 because they are one driver of ambiguity when calculating future free cash
 flows FFCF [1]. UC Health provides leadership and strategic direction for
 UC’s five academic medical centers and 18 health professional schools.
 Contract variations within 1 (one) medical center has a multiplier effect
 in the consolidated annual financial reporting. In December 2017 we
 created an internal project charter [2] to consolidate contracts financial
 accounts receivables activity (including system optimisation) within a
 revenue cycle operations department. Importantly, this project charter
 integrated managed care contracts built is a second Epic application
 (Tapestry). Prior to this, information technology IT staff made systems
 changes (in the Resolute application only). This work was driven by direct
 communications from the contract negotiation functions at UCSD Health. In
 April 2018, we started a collaboration with the University of California
 San Francisco Medical Center.  At the highest level, the
 collaboration was intended to address a fragmented finance and contracts
 management landscape built up over time. These campuses share an
 electronic medical records system (Epic) which benefits from standardised
 exchanges of contract language and data structure definitions. By itself,
 executed contracts and several of the Epic recommended design and
 contracts management tools can be inadequate in terms of
 language, content, medium, and design. Operational challenges created by
 incomplete contracts specifications, long cycle times and poor
 'fit' between the data and the build almost always add
 to aggravated operational issues. Rather than enablers of business
 success, contracts become obstacles [3]. Our collaboration has four main
 purposes: First  to resolve or at least alleviate the problems of
 dysfunctional contract communication. Second to enable the exchange of
 pertinent, solution oriented legal, data and
 analytic information among different UC medical center revenue
 cycle organisations. Third to intensify and expand efforts to simplifying
 contracts, especially in fundamental areas like naming, ordering and
 sharing test data. Fourth to raise awareness that simplifying contracts
 and pre and post contract data might prompt a new cluster for
 applied intra- and interdisciplinary research for reducing cash expenses
 from fixed and variable costs in time CE.   References 1 Grzegorz
 M 11 2008. A portfolio management approach in accounts receivable
 management. Journal South East European Journal of Economics and
 Business, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 89-96. DOI: 10.2478/v10033-008-0018-4 2 Ahl
 S, Felker C and Thurman P 12 2017. UCSD Health internal
 document. Hospital, Professional, Managed Care contract
 performance operational lead re location to revenue cycle patient
 financial services / Hospital, Professional, Managed Care contract
 contract maintenance setup and support / Contract maintenance co operative
 strategy with other UC medical centers . This is identified in a
 consolidated revenue cycle data catalog &lt;d/078 2018 03 018 help
 create a sustainable contract management service&gt; 3 Swiss Re Centre
 for Global Dialogue 2016. International conference on
 contract simplification.
 &lt;http://bit.ly/2GvLqOK&gt;. See
 especially, Kilgour S and Unsworth R. Swiss Re Managing
 the complexity: text mining analytics.
 &lt;http://bit.ly/2uIqChP&gt; last accesed 2018 04 03. UC
 San Diego Health converts its contracts into Oasis Legal XML [4]. This
 conversion yields important analytic and information governance
 results.  We adopted a (Epic) system capable naming convention
 for the data structure. We developed a brief Adobe Spark on the job
 training manual, a data catalog for the individual contracts and lines. We
 hope to make this a sharable UC standard available to all UC medical
 center campus partners (here on Dash). Certain features
 in JMP 13 are very useful for exploring this unstructured text
 data. JMP Pro 13 helps cluster terms and phrases and use text in
 predictive models. Some of the capabilities required for text analysis are
 analogous to those required for tabular data. Text analytics is like
 general multivariate analysis. Topic analysis is like factor analysis.
 Singular value decomposition (SVD) is like principal component analysis.
 The Lanczos SVD handles messy data well and yields more meaningful factors
 necessary for naming and ordering specific contract lines in Epic. See
 2016. JMP 13 Preview: New text analytics in JMP Pro
 &lt;http://bit.ly/2H6UQgV&gt; last accesed 2018 04 03. 4
 See OASIS Advancing open standards for the information society
 &lt;http://bit.ly/2EhrDww&gt; last accesed 2018 04
 03. OASIS is a not for profit consortium that brings people
 together to agree on intelligent ways to exchange information over the
 Internet and within their organisations.
description: Produced and disseminated by UCSD Health administrative staff
 ('employees') under the 2015 10 23 University of California
 Presidential Open Access Policy &lt;http://bit.ly/2ptLzaU&gt;. Last accessed 2018 03 20. The authors do not own the copyrights for this work, but grant to the Regents of the University of California a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, for the purpose of making their articles widely and freely available in this open access repository. See policy text 3(B)(1). There is no embargo period that would delay this publication. See procedures 5(C).