How AI is Disrupting Rebate Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Some people are still hesitant about implementing AI in their organizations. But in reality, AI utilization – especially for repetitive workflow and information processing – is a welcome and positive change for the workforce.

Because AI can interact with and process information faster than humans can, time to information is significantly decreased, allowing workers, and thereby businesses, to accelerate their productivity.

This is especially true for those involved in the management of rebate contracts in the pharmaceutical industry, where AI can be used to automate and augment this highly manual process and remove the heavy lifting off the backs of high value and trained employees.

More pharma companies are catching onto the game-changing application of AI technologies to completely revolutionize rebate management – performing weeks of tedious work in minutes or even seconds.

In this article, I’ll explore how AI is disrupting what’s historically been an incredibly challenging, manual and time-consuming process.

Before I delve into how AI can augment the management of rebate contracts, it’s important to understand the core metrics involved in this business process to successfully automate this critical task. For context, when I talk about rebate management, I’m referring to the extraction, analysis and visualization of rebate contract data (not the creation of contracts or contract lifecycle management itself). The core metrics are:

These are the key metrics to getting value from your rebate contracts, and by leveraging AI technologies, achieving all three is possible.

How AI is disrupting rebate contract processing

If you’re in the pharmaceutical industry, you know rebate contracts have become the lifeblood for managing distribution, payer, provider and government relationships. While there’s been lots of automation to improve the overall contract lifecycle process, there’s been very little effort to get greater use out of the contracts and leverage the extensive information they contain. That’s where AI comes in.

By harnessing the power of AI, you can revolutionize the analysis and visualization of contracted agreements — revolutionizing your entire rebate management process.

At EncompaaS, we use a variety of AI technologies, in combination, to automate and gain value from your contracts quickly, with high accuracy and at scale.

Leveraging Azure OpenAI, Supervised Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, all live rebate contracts (including master agreements, amendments, and associated documentation) are automatically inspected for quality.

We do this by scanning the content of contracts and intelligently extracting key information such as Contract Value, Dates, Parties, Products, and applying it as structured metadata on the contract itself. This metadata can then be used for searching, sorting, filtering, and reporting in a consistent way across all contracts wherever they are stored.

Your most valuable contract and sales data can then be presented in highly visual dashboards, providing live, up-to-date landscape views which contract teams, rebate contract managers, and sales representatives can harness for informed decision-making on current strategies, rebates and market data. This can include critical information like what contracts expire in the next three or six months, which contracts need modified contract language because of a new legal finding, is there a 340B implication, or the range of discount levels.

Using these technologies, we have worked with one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers to automate the extraction of data from their rebate contracts, resulting in:

• 10,000+ contracts and amendments analyzed using AI
• 140,000 data points extracted
• 95% data accuracy rate achieved on average
• 4,000 hours saved in manual processing each quarter
• 150% improvement in the speed to source specific data points
• 90% increase of finding commercial or contractual risks in data

By leveraging AI into this core business process, manufacturers immediately simplify the heaviness and complexity of the rebate program. Highly qualified rebate contract teams no longer need to leaf through complex contracts and amendments daily to manually extract important contract data, leading to greater job fulfillment, upskilling and advancement. Ultimately, it has enabled the organization to save tens of millions of dollars on their rebate program each year.

This is the world AI is creating for rebate contract managers and its full potential is waiting to be unlocked.