Kaley Cook, contracts and legal operations manager at U.S. healthcare network Carbon Health, gives us an in-depth account of the selection and implementation of Traact for entity. licenses and permits management.
Carbon Health is a nationwide network of primary healthcare and urgent care clinics in the U.S. that also provides telemedicine care. In recent years, the company has grown tremendously, catalyzing the need for technology innovation in the entity management and facility licenses/permits areas.
Manual Approaches Were Breaking Down
As the contracts and legal operations manager at Carbon Health (“Carbon”), I drive our contract management process, entity management, litigation support, corporate governance, and legal technology solutions. Historically, we had been tracking and updating all entity information and licenses/permits manually in Google Sheets. However, as Carbon expanded and the complexity of our entities, subsidiaries and professional corporations increased, the Google Sheets data management approach was no longer working well.
For example, Carbon was increasingly launching new locations. With each one, we had anywhere from 4-7 licenses and permits to obtain, depending on the geographic jurisdiction. With the Google Sheets method, data could be easily missed, entered incorrectly, or accidentally manipulated. We desperately needed a secure, widely accessible single source of truth for all data under the all-important facility license and permit umbrella.
Finding Traact
We began to look at our options for entity management and licenses/permits management technologies and considered a handful of products on the market. There were some big, very well-known vendors in their respective spaces, with some offering more than one solution while others specialized in only one.
Several prospective tech providers seemed intent on just handing us a tool “out of the box” and asking us to make our data and processes fit into the limitations of their tools. Traact was unique because they offered both entity management and licenses/permits management, and they also were truly excited to partner with Carbon to adapt their solutions to best fit our needs. Carbon selected Traact and began to discuss the implementation process.
Planning a Successful Implementation, Tackling Entity Management First
In collaboration with Traact, Carbon decided to tackle the entity management migration first, because completing that was instrumental to the later success of our license and permits migration. Entity Management is one of the foundational modules of Traact. Therefore, we could rely on their team’s deep knowledge and insight to configure Carbon’s entities in Traact to accurately reflect the structure and relationships between every entity and subsidiary.
Also, Traact customized its system to incorporate Carbon’s need to demonstrate more detailed entity relationships, allowing us to capture organizational relationships beyond just parent-child hierarchies. Traact was able to customize their technology to create a dotted line relationship marker in our organizational chart to accurately reflect the connections between our entities.
Traact’s flexibility, creativity and superior client service made their entity management module accomplish exactly what we needed it to do. Their team was immensely helpful for me as I led this first part of the migration.
Unique Challenges of the License & Permit Migration
Migrating our facility licensing and permit tracker from a Google Sheet to Traact was a very complex, multi-dimensional process. We had literally thousands of data points that had to be mapped over to customized fields while still maintaining the integrity of our source data. The Traact implementation team helped us to assess the current state of our data and made insightful recommendations for how we could improve upon our tracking and tasking. This evaluative process informed our design of the Traact Permits & Licenses module during the pre-implementation phase.
The most challenging aspect of the Traact Permits & Licenses deployment was ensuring we had touched every single existing data point of every permit and license in the Carbon universe. This was the only way to ensure we would know exactly where the data would be mapped in Traact. Also, because our locations are spread out across the U.S., and regulations differ based on jurisdiction, there had previously been a lack of consistency in the key information we had for each license. The Traact implementation team spent a significant amount of time learning and understanding Carbon’s dataset before we were ready to migrate. They helped us identify how to successfully capture every piece of relevant data for every permit and license record we would be migrating.
Traact’s Deep Data Dive and Heavy Lifting
Traact became intimately familiar with our data and our internal goals for that data. Their level of in-depth immersion in our data was invaluable as we shaped the design and functionality of the entity management and permits & licensing modules.
Once the design and customization were finalized, the Traact implementation team took over the heavy lifting and migrated our data for us. Due to frequent quality checks throughout the migration, we experienced minimal data discrepancies. Ultimately, this led to a very smooth transition to Traact for the entire Carbon Legal Ops team.
The Many Benefits of Traact for Carbon Health
Implementing Traact’s entity management and permits & licenses modules has given Carbon an essential boost in many ways. Once Traact was fully rolled out, we experienced a huge decrease in requests from the business for copies of licenses, application status updates, renewal reminders, and various one-off questions that the Licensing Team had previously fielded on a daily basis. Because Traact enabled us to introduce a self-service model for these inquiries, we saw a significant decrease in time spent responding to incoming license/permit related questions.
Also, Traact enabled Carbon to consolidate several manual tracking documents into a secure, easily reportable, and comprehensive single source of truth for both entity management and licensing. Collectively, these benefits bolstered the overall efficiency of our whole licensing team. Traact allows us to focus our time on the more substantive aspects of our facility licensing strategy.
In addition, the Traact interface is extremely intuitive, clean, and easy to use, which allowed for widespread adoption of the technology with minimal training requirements. Traact’s accessibility and self-service capabilities have made it possible to eliminate much of the administrative burden we had been shouldering.
Traact – A True Partner for Carbon Health
Delivering upon its early promise, Traact is truly a vital partner to Carbon Health. They value their clients’ product feedback, so we feel both heard and accommodated. We receive a constant flow of product updates, feature releases and user experience updates which result in an ever-evolving product that gets better with each new release. Their customer service team is truly unmatched.
As Carbon continues to evolve, we can be confident that Traact will grow with us. Traact creates the technology we need to keep our entity management and permits/licenses teams on the right track.
Comment: We don’t always share case studies, but this kind of client insight really is helpful. Thanks to Kaley Cook for sharing her insights. If you wish to contribute your own article of this nature please contact caroline@legaltechnology.com
Take a look below at our very first article about Traact.
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