Health Agency Procurement and Contracting Best Practices for Overdose Data to Action Recipients

October 27, 2025 | Alyssa Merski

Health agencies are leveraging best business improvement practices to more efficiently address complex public health issues including overdose prevention. CDC's Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) cooperative agreement provides funding to 90 public health agencies to reduce drug overdose deaths. This important program supports data collection on nonfatal and fatal overdoses, which informs prevention programs. Public health agencies engage with important partners across this work, creating the need for efficient and timely contracting and procurement processes. Business process improvements and best practices in procurement and contracting ensure strong partnerships are vital to the continued success of OD2A programs. The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and Health Management Associates compiled best practices from OD2A-funded jurisdictions to inspire other agencies in their own business process improvement.

Promote Collaboration and Learning Across Programmatic and Financial Units

Does your health agency experience siloed programmatic and financial departments? A lack of relationships and communication across departments hinders cooperation, slows processes, and creates inefficiencies in business processes.

Functional work units, divisions, and even external agencies share the same goal — to serve the people in their jurisdictions through high-quality public health services and programs. This goal is best served when programs, procurement, contracting, and other administrative work units collaborate. Practical steps to work together towards shared goals include:

• Scheduling regular meetings between program and financial teams to support problem solving, communication, and grant management.
• Collaborating on standard operating procedures (SOPs) and cross training staff on SOPs.
• Ensuring shared, ongoing learning and continuous improvement.
• Conducting regular procurement and contracting training so that capacity and trust across work units is standardized and maintained.
• Surveying staff and partners before starting procurement improvements to make customer-focused decisions for any new systems.

Establish a CLM System and Robust Data Collection

Are your health agency’s contracting workflows cumbersome and difficult to track? A Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system can help by streamlining contract processes and creating more transparency for all staff involved. A CLM can eliminate the wondering around where a contract is in the process or why a procurement request is still not approved.

A CLM system is a software or a web-based program designed to manage the entire lifecycle of a contract, beginning with initiation and authoring through negotiation, approval, execution, compliance, and renewal or expiration. CLM systems are especially important in managing complex contracts that are necessary in public health and overdose prevention activities. Health agencies who use a CLM system with automated, comprehensive data collection, audits, and validation have improved efficiency, greater transparency, and accountability around financial processes. Process owners can support greater efficiency and collaboration by providing the appropriate level of access to the status of a contract, issues for resolution, approvals, and more across work units. Through these systems program and financial staff can track the contract through each stage of a required process, receive automated notifications about next steps, access all information in a centralized location, and build in checks to ensure compliance with local and state processes and regulations. Examples of CLM systems used by health agencies include Cobblestone, Dynamics 365 and Power Bi based systems, and Agiloft.  

Create SOPs and Streamlined Processes

Have you ever felt unclear about where to start on contracting with a partner or unsure about the next steps of a procurement process? Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) can increase efficiency by providing defined roles and responsibilities for staff and reduce rework by ensuring standard staff guidance.

Program and financial staff can work together to identify and remove unnecessary steps in the procurement and contracting processes to streamline the delivery of services and programs. Once efficient processes are established, writing clear SOPs and ensuring that everyone engaged is familiar with the SOPs will make for a smoother and more effective process.

Examples of health agency initiatives to provide institutionalized support of SOPs include:

• Designating a training manager on the procurement and contracting team to train and build the capacity of all grants/contract managers across the agency.
• Making training materials and documents available in a central, shared drive for staff to reference and build capacity on program teams.

Business Process Improvement

Business processes such as contracting and procurement can have an impact on OD2A programs. Health agencies have proven that efficient financial and administrative systems and aligned policies and processes create the environment necessary to implement the complex interventions that are necessary to reduce overdose. For more information about process improvement for OD2A-related business processes like procurement and contracting, contact ASTHO at OD2A@astho.org