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 pharmaceutical rebate management, 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.

The key metrics of effective rebate management

Before I delve into how AI can augment rebate management, 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 rebate contracts or contract lifecycle management itself). The core metrics are:

• Scale: You need to be able to analyze thousands of contracts and the amendments and notices that come with them.
• Accuracy: You need to be able to do it accurately so that there is little or no human intervention required.
• Time: You need to be able to do it quickly because you need answers in minutes, not days or weeks.

These are the key metrics to getting value from your rebate contracts, and by leveraging the best rebate management software, 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.

The EncompaaS approach to AI-driven rebate management

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.

Using our advanced rebate management software, your most valuable contract and sales data can then be presented in highly visual dashboards, providing live, up-to-date landscape views. Contract teams, rebate contract managers, and sales representatives can then harness this data 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.

Real results: A case study of a pharmaceutical giant

One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers adopted our AI-powered solution 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 rebate processing each quarter
• 150% improvement in the speed to source specific data points
• 90% increase of finding commercial or contractual risks in data

These data points showcase the benefits of leveraging the best rebate management software to unlock efficiencies and savings.

The future of rebate management with AI

By leveraging AI into this core business process, manufacturers immediately simplify the heaviness and complexity of managing pharmaceutical rebate programs. 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.

By implementing AI-powered rebate software, manufacturers can simplify pharmaceutical supplier rebate management, enhance job fulfilment and 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.