The healthcare industry is in flux, and it’s difficult to keep up. Skyrocketing costs force many healthcare providers to adopt new business models, and then there are compliance regulations. The average HIPAA violation fine is over a million dollars.
It’s not easy to manage, but when you have a culture of compliance in your healthcare business, compliance just doesn’t rest on your shoulders.
Everyone in your healthcare practice is responsible for compliance. The question is how can you get everyone in your organization on board with compliance?
Keep reading to learn how you can create an organizational culture around regulatory compliance in healthcare.
Table of Contents
Get Employee Buy-In
Getting buy-in from everyone in your organization is a big obstacle to create a culture of compliance. You can start by getting everyone in your organization to share the same definition of compliance.
Take a survey of everyone in their organization to get a sense of how they define compliance. Also, ask them if they have witnessed any compliance violations and if they feel comfortable reporting those violations.
The survey is important because it helps you identify barriers that are in the way to full compliance. You can overcome them with regular training and education.
Take a Risk Assessment
Discovering that your employees don’t feel comfortable reporting compliance issues is a major risk to your organization. You have to have a comprehensive risk assessment to learn what the other compliance risks are.
Risk management in healthcare includes people, technology, operations, safety, and legal risks. Your healthcare practice demands that you minimize the risk as much as possible.
A risk assessment uncovers where your organization needs improvement in each area.
Build Compliance Awareness
A compliance awareness campaign is a great first step to encourage a healthcare compliance culture. You can have short meetings and team activities that go over the policies and expectations around compliance.
You don’t want employees to feel like this is just another thing to do. Explain why it’s important and how it impacts their daily work.
Create Policies to Prove the Culture
You can talk about having a culture of compliance, but if there isn’t action behind it, you’ll lose credibility with everyone in your organization.
You need to take what you learned in the risk assessment and surveys and create compliance policies that make a difference. For example, you can create IT policies that govern how devices get used in your office. That minimizes privacy and IT security risks.
Another example is to have an open-door policy for employees to report compliance concerns and violations. They’ll see things that you don’t, and you have to make sure that they know that there won’t be retribution for reporting compliance issues.
Healthcare Culture of Compliance
If you want your healthcare organization to survive in these challenging times, you have to create a culture of compliance. The best way to do that is to get your employees on the same page as to what compliance means. Your policies should also support them in their work to create a compliance culture.
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