To support its mission as a leading integrated healthcare provider, Woods System of Care manages a complex portfolio of county, payer, school district, and vendor contracts. Previously, this process relied on manual reviews of agreements spanning up to 200 pages, where critical terms like bed hold rates and jurisdictional requirements had to be tracked by hand. To scale effectively, Woods turned to Workday.
By centralizing its portfolio with Workday Contract Intelligence and Workday Contract Lifecycle Management, Woods automated data extraction and empowered its administration team to answer queries faster using Ask AI. These advancements allowed the team to cut standard contract review time in half and reduce the review of massive 200-page agreements from days to just hours, ensuring faster turnarounds without constant legal escalation.
When the portfolio grows, manual review doesn’t scale.
Payer agreements, county contracts, school district deals, vendor arrangements—many human services organizations are still managing all of it by hand. Each contract has its own terms, renewal dates, and compliance requirements. Staying on top of all of it manually is a full-time job—and then some.
Woods System of Care is one of the largest networks of providers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, autism, and behavioral health complexities. As the organization has grown, so has its contract portfolio. Keeping pace with it fell to VP of Administration Mary Ellen Angelini and contract administrators Laura Calderone and Farrah Messinger—three people responsible for hundreds of agreements, each one requiring careful attention.
Woods bought a Mercedes. We’re not driving it like a Pinto—more like a Volvo. There’s more under the hood.
VP of Administration
Before Workday, every answer required reading the whole thing.
Every contract review started the same way. Contract administrators would do a first pass on an incoming agreement, which took three to four hours for a standard county contract. From there it moved to Angelini. If legal needed to get involved, the team was looking at a minimum seven-day turnaround, and for large, high-value agreements, the full cycle ran closer to two weeks.
The knowledge problem was just as real. Termination language, payment terms, notice periods—each had to be tracked down, documented, and filed away for next time. For evergreen payer contracts that renewed year after year, the same questions came back around every renewal cycle, and without a central system, the work started fresh each time. The analysis from two years ago was in a spreadsheet. Somewhere.
A 200-page contract reviewed in hours, not days.
When Woods needed to turn around a 200-page New York Office of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (OIDD) contract quickly, the team used Ask AI in Workday Contract Intelligence to query the document rather than read it from start to finish. They asked specific questions and got answers that pointed directly to the relevant language.
For standard agreements, Workday cut Calderone’s first-pass review time in half. A process that once required reading clause by clause now cuts review time in half.
It would have taken us a few days. With Workday, it’s an hour and a half. Workday brings you right to the location so you can check for yourself. All of that adds up to reduced cycle time.
VP of Administration
The right questions, asked every time.
Some of the most consequential language in Woods’ contracts is also the hardest to find quickly. Bed hold provisions are a good example—the terms governing what gets paid when a client is hospitalized, has run away, or hasn’t been present for a set number of days. Rates and timelines vary by county contract. Getting the details wrong has real financial consequences, and finding them used to mean searching page by page with no guarantee of a fast answer.
Workday Contract Intelligence’s built-in algorithms surface key data on indemnification, expiration dates, effective dates, and contract types without manual extraction. Ask AI handles the more specific queries: programmatic performance terms, jurisdictional requirements, state statutes, and complex riders that can sometimes contradict each other across agreements. The team can get to an answer and verify the source language in the same session.
A platform built for where Woods is going.
Woods uses Workday for contract creation, filing, and intake. The organization has established workflows, connected DocuSign for executed agreements, built school district templates, mapped data fields, and connected SharePoint. By Angelini’s own measure, the team is at a mid-maturity stage—using the platform consistently while more capability lies ahead.
As Woods expands into outpatient and Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) payer territory, the team is preparing for a growing volume of evergreen payer contracts with auto-renewing rates and tight notice windows for renegotiation. Ask AI question groups organized by contract type will mean the right questions get asked on every review. Automated renewal alerts will replace the manual calendar tracking that makes it easy to miss renewal windows when dozens of agreements run on different fiscal calendars. Export reports will give leadership contract visibility without anyone building a spreadsheet from scratch.
For a team that already cut review time in half and worked through a 200-page agreement in an hour and a half, the foundation is solid. What comes next is just a matter of turning the key.