Focusing on compliance doesn’t take away from the patient experience – it helps improve it.
Every organization knows the consequences of noncompliance: fines, audits, and potential lawsuits. Yet every organization also knows that meeting compliance regulations isn’t just about reducing the risk of penalties.
New challenges in the 21st century make today’s compliance regulations a key part of ensuring the safety, privacy, and health of patients and staff members. Rules about information security, harassment, and use of social media help ensure that healthcare organizations create a safe and high-quality environment. Healthcare organizations can only maintain compliance when every staff member takes responsibility for following procedures and regulations.
The challenges of compliance management for hospitals
While managing compliance is no simple matter for any organization, it can be an especially complex, challenging, and resource-intensive challenge for those working in healthcare due to:
- New and continually changing regulations. New statutes around technology, privacy, safety, and data place an even greater burden on organizations, who must already track and manage certification, continuing education, diversity, and harassment training for employees.
- Antiquated or manual compliance systems. Tracking and reporting on compliance manually isn’t just a time-consuming activity: it’s a high-risk one. Spreadsheets and paper files can’t deliver the transparency, visibility, and analytical capability necessary to staying in continual alignment with changing federal and state regulations.
- Outdated delivery methods and unengaging training content. Modern methods are used to engage patients, and yet compliance training for healthcare employees is often years old, unengaging, and dry. Compliance training remains the dreaded “have to,” and as a result, is often put off until the last minute. This delay not only puts the healthcare organization at risk but creates even more work for administrators, who must track down those who are continually in noncompliance.
Transforming compliance management with the right tools
The factors above – changing requirements, antiquated software, and outdated methods and content – can make compliance management difficult and time consuming.
Yet while organizations can’t do anything about rapidly changing regulations, they can transform how they manage these regulations. How? With a configurable learning platform that improves the cost effectiveness and efficiency of managing compliance.
With the right learning platform, healthcare organizations can:
- Efficiently deliver targeted compliance training to anyone, at any time, across the entire organization
- Automatically track training completions and escalate noncompletions
- Use more engaging, relevant, updated compliance content
- Access real-time compliance data, multiple reporting options, and key analytics
- Automate end to end compliance training that enables organizations to “set it and forget it”
- Increase visibility of and transparency into all aspects of compliance
How streamlining compliance management drives engagement and increases trust
Enabling the more efficient, cost-effective management of compliance both saves time and reduces risk. And yet automating tracking and reporting helps healthcare organizations to do more than just avoid noncompliance. Increasing the visibility, access to data, and transparency of the entire compliance process also helps organizations:
- Drive engagement and continuous development. Poor delivery methods and outdated content keep compliance training from functioning as a useful, pertinent form of continuing education, one that has day-to-day relevance for healthcare employees. And yet compliance training doesn’t have to be boring. With Cornerstone, hospitals can ensure compliance training content is engaging, relevant, and in alignment with organization objectives, as well as state and federal ones.
- Increase the trust of stakeholders. Proving compliance to regulatory bodies is important. But patients and community members also want to know that a healthcare organization is abiding by the rules and ensuring a safe, accessible learning environment. Cornerstone enables administrators to quickly and easily generate customized reports on all facets of compliance training. The insight from these reports can be used to inform community leaders, drive positive press releases and communication, and share successes with the media.
- Free HR staff to spend time on solving critical HR issues. As healthcare organizations must increasingly do more with less, every administrative function needs the capability to streamline previously time-consuming and manual tasks. For HR, automating many of the functions of compliance tracking and reporting can free significant time for focusing on the real work of HR, which benefits hospitals and patients across the board.
