Case Study
Emergent Health Partners Cuts Contract Generation to Five Minutes with IntelAgree
Overview
Emergent Health Partners (EHP) operates six ambulance services across southern Michigan, leaving little room for inefficiency. Hundreds of agreements lived across a shared folder system and a spreadsheet that no one fully trusted, managed almost entirely by one person.
That person was Keith Hart, Compliance Officer for EHP. Hart carried the contract operation largely alone: tracking expiration dates, reviewing incoming agreements, coordinating approvals, and fielding requests from across the organization.
With IntelAgree, EHP centralized its entire contract operation from a legacy file system no one could fully navigate to a single platform that handles storage, generation, approvals, and expiration tracking. Today, Hart manages more than 1,200 contracts and produces standard agreements in as little as five minutes, with dispatch supervisors able to pull up contract details on their own to support better decisions in the field.
"As long as I have an address for legal notices, the legal name of the place, and I know who's going to sign it, I can generate a contract in five minutes."
About Emergent Health Partners
Emergent Health Partners is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that owns and operates six ambulance services across 14 counties in southern Michigan. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, EHP was formed in 2012 to unify ambulance services with roots dating back to 1981, and today employs more than 900 people and responds to upward of 200,000 medical emergencies per year.
Challenges
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Fragmented contract storage across a shared folder and a spreadsheet, with inconsistent naming and missing records
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Manual version control relying on date-stamped file names and converted PDFs
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No centralized expiration tracking, leaving critical renewal deadlines unmonitored
Key Results
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Cut standard contract generation time to five minutes with IntelAgree templates
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Manages more than 1,200 contracts in a single searchable repository
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Scaled contract management without the unnecessary complexity of enterprise software
Solution
Five Minutes to a Finished Contract: Building Consistency Through Templates
Updating a contract used to mean a scavenger hunt. Hart would search for the most recent version of an agreement — often a scanned PDF, sometimes crooked on the page, frequently the only copy anyone could locate. Converting it to a Word document introduced countless formatting errors.
Cleaning up the conversion errors alone could take hours, and the end result rarely looked like a professional agreement. "I would generally find an old PDF that was scanned improperly and convert it into a Word document because nobody knew where the original Word document was," Hart said. "And then I’d have to correct all the errors as a result of converting from PDF to Word. It never worked right."
With IntelAgree, EHP built 30 to 40 contract templates, with approximately six used on a regular basis. For organizations needing agreements with multiple EHP business units, contracts that once had to be prepared one by one can now be produced in bulk. "We get requests constantly from hospice agencies or skilled nursing facilities wanting us to update a contract," said Hart. "Having the templates just speeds that up so much."
The consistency gain has been just as meaningful as the speed. Contracts generated since EHP implemented IntelAgree follow the same structure and language across every organization they contract with. "If you look back at the contracts since we implemented IntelAgree, they're almost word for word, the exact same," said Hart.
From Shared Folders and Spreadsheets to One Centralized CLM Tool
Before IntelAgree, EHP's contracts lived in multiple places at once. The shared folder held more than 1,300 files accumulated over years of growth: active contracts, expired agreements, duplicates, and supporting documents. The spreadsheet tracking them had passed through several hands, and keeping it current was a constant challenge. Naming conventions varied by whoever had last touched a file, so the same agreement might appear under different names or not at all, prompting someone to upload it again.
IntelAgree processed the entire file system in a matter of days, accurately extracting effective dates, expiration dates, and counterparty information from even the most degraded source material. "It was kind of exciting to see all those files show up in the system and be able to look through them and realize that the machine learning tools did a really good job of picking up the key points," said Hart.
EHP now manages more than 1,200 contracts in a single searchable repository, with approximately 55 to 60 users across the organization. For the rest of the organization, Hart keeps the guidance simple. "The search function is basically like using Google," he noted. "I'll just tell people to search what they're looking for, and they’re almost guaranteed they're going to find it."
The Right Tool For A Lean Organization
For EHP, finding the right contract management solution meant finding one that fit the way the organization actually worked. At a not-for-profit without a dedicated legal department, simplicity and usability determine whether a tool gets used at all. "People really liked the ability to find a contract and be able to understand what it required of them when it was relevant to their department," Hart explained. "So, it got adopted pretty quickly."
The platform's AI-powered ingestion settled the decision. With 1,300 to 1,400 legacy files to upload, Hart knew that manually cataloguing each document was not a realistic option. A platform that could extract key attributes automatically was a requirement.
"Having some type of machine learning or AI that would go through and pick out the important points up front was going to be critical," Hart noted. "Otherwise implementation would have taken months and would have required a lot more than we were capable of giving it."
IntelAgree gave EHP the core functionality it required: a searchable repository, configurable templates, and automated expiration tracking. For Hart, that flexibility made IntelAgree the clear choice over more complex, enterprise-grade alternatives. "We didn't need 14 levels of approval control," he noted. "It was going to be a few people, maybe half a dozen. And IntelAgree fits the way we actually work."
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