Electronic Health Reporter

In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.

Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.

Elevator Pitch

Using pre-defined rules based on a combination of patented technology and natural language processing and machine learning techniques, Seal Software offers a disruptive technology that automatically locates and provides insight into unstructured contract data wherever it resides in an organization. This easily deployable solution can rapidly process thousands of contracts, reducing years of manual process time to hours.

The Seal Contract Discovery and Analytics solution is the only contract optimization technology available on the market that is truly customizable by the client across any healthcare organization. The Seal Platform delivers “non-standard” clause detection based on customer-defined boundaries and is able to continually learn and create reusable content, improving accuracy and relevancy as it relates to an organization’s specific needs. In contrast, Seal Software’s competitors require significant customization before they can adequately process contracts.

About Statement

Seal Software is committed to disrupting the way healthcare is managing, analyzing and optimizing their contracts. Seal’s Contract Discovery and Analytics solution provides complete contract visibility and customizable review and analysis through its unique blend of proprietary technology, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques.

In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, even the slightest delay in responding to market fluctuations, regulatory compliance reforms and organizational changes can pay a heavy toll on an organization. With the Seal Platform, healthcare organizations around the world can effectively access and manage their contract portfolio to maximize revenue opportunities, mitigate risk and reduce expenses, reducing manual review time from days – even years – to hours.

Founder’s Story
Seal Software was founded by Ulf Zetterberg (current CEO) and Kevin Gidney (current CTO). With their vast knowledge and experience in the field of content management, they were able to isolate two of the biggest challenges faced by customers – migration of legacy data and consolidation of information from multiple data sources into new applications. This idea was the foundation for Seal. They built the Seal platform as a means for transforming unstructured contract data into searchable information, and facilitate smoother and quicker contract hand-off processes within the various stakeholders and systems.

Market Opportunity

The healthcare industry is perhaps one of the fastest-growing industries, with a multitude of players and complex, dynamic and critically important contracts. With an increasing number of claims as well as governing regulations (i.e. HIPPA, HITECH and ACA) that demand strict compliance with quick turnaround times, these organizations are under constant pressure to process these claims and comply with these regulations within these compressed timeframes, while simultaneously minimizing legal and administrative costs. A lack of operational flexibility and immediate visibility into these contracts can cause detrimental harm to these organizations. Cyber breach, lawsuits and payment discrepancies are just a few of the significant problems that inflict increased risk and cost drain on these organizations, not to mention the damage to their reputation.

Services and Products Offered

Seal Software provides healthcare organizations a fully visible, accessible and searchable portfolio for future contract intelligence and a lower total processing cost per contract by creating a fully searchable contractual document portfolio. Once healthcare organizations discover and review all of their contractual management information, they are ready for the next step in contractual data management – to proactively manage and mitigate risks and quickly react to business changes, as well as continuously onboarding new contracts moving forward.

Problems Solved

Seal Software has created a new product category in terms of contract optimization. It provides a solution for a problem most companies don’t want to admit they have: minimal visibility into their contract portfolios and, therefore, lack of actionable intelligence to proactively drive better business decisions while effectively reacting to ad hoc, potentially adverse, market events that could derail their organizations.

Value Proposition

Any healthcare organization managing tens of thousands of contracts – from leasing and third-party vendor agreements to employment and operating agreements – needs a solution to ensure their internal stakeholders across the enterprise have complete visibility into their portfolio to reduce risk and increase profits. The Seal platform provides much-needed insight into contract terms, enabling companies to save money and better allocate resources. Seal has already helped hundreds of companies save countless hours and millions of dollars.

Key Messages

Seal contract discovery and analytics enables organizations to:

• Gain visibility into unstructured content in contractual documents, mitigating risk and uncovering hidden revenue opportunities to increase profitability
• Enable multiple levels of customer control and customization, including non-standard clause detection based on customer definitions, as it utilizes proprietary natural language processing and machine learning technology
• Experience increased automation for contractual document review and analysis process up to 80 percent faster than traditional industry practices.
• Integrate with leading customer relationship management (CRM), contract lifecycle management (CLM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions out-of-the-box integration

Booth Number

7765

Key Executives at Conference

• Mike Cram Michael Cram

  , director of professional services

• Scott Mars, vice president of customer success
• Lloyd Alexander, vice president of contract strategy

Clients Served

IMS Health

IMS Health is the world’s leading information services, and Technology Company dedicated to making healthcare perform better. By applying cutting-edge analytics and proprietary application suites hosted on the IMS One intelligent cloud, the company connects more than 10 petabytes of complex healthcare data on diseases, treatments, costs and outcomes to enable their clients to run their operations more efficiently.

Banner Health

Banner Health is one of the largest nonprofit hospital systems in the country and operates 25 hospitals and other related health entities and services in seven states. With nearly 300,000 members currently served by the Banner Health Network, they have demonstrated the ability to effectively manage the health and wellness populations of insured members in in both government and private plans.

Selling Proposition

Seal Contract Discovery and Analytics can provide visibility into payer and provider agreements to uncover non-standard clauses for contract standardization across different geographic locations. The solution significantly reduces manual effort needed for reviewing thousands of contracts by allowing users to continue to search for contracts without having to reopen files or relying upon excel spreadsheets. With excellent integration capabilities, the Seal platform is capable of integration with provider demographic, billing, reimbursement, CLM, CRM and ERP solutions, thus reducing integration glitches and contract handoff times.

When Founded

April 2010

Number of full-time employees

More than 100

Specific Reason for Attendance

The transformation of U.S. healthcare – with the goal of improving efficiency, access and outcomes while reducing costs – demands advanced analytics to derive more value from the healthcare system. Five years from now, we’re going to look back and realize that companies that adopted predictive analytics are the ones that have a significant advantage in the market.

Industry Outlook (What’s the most important, trend, topic or challenge the organization faces?)

Few industries are as complex as healthcare. Federal and state regulations create an elaborate compliance burden and directly affect financial performance. As the global healthcare world continues its exponential growth in partnerships and complexity, so too will the volume and complexity of contracts and the countless ways they will be written.  Seal’s technology is and will be increasingly critical to organizations as they strive to maintain dynamic access and insight into their contracts.