Help your healthcare organization mitigate risk by building strong relationships

When it comes to regulatory change management, healthcare organizations deal with a lot of complexity and confusion. As a compliance officer, you can help your organization cut through the chaos – and mitigate risk. 

You can best support your organization by implementing effective regulatory change management practices. Yet many compliance officers overlook the key to establishing a strong regulatory change management program: building relationships with departmental and operational leaders. 

Relationships are at the heart of regulatory change management programs. To be a successful influencer in your organization, hone these four skills: 

1. Know the who 
2. Be at the right tables 
3. Measure what matters 
4. Know the business 

Know the who 

Being an effective influencer requires a solid knowledge base about your organization and the ability to develop relationships. But influence skills don’t come naturally to everyone. 

Don’t be intimidated if you’re uncomfortable with skills that may seem more suited for a sales role. Like any core competency, you can strengthen your influencer skills over time. 

It starts with knowing who the key influencers and decision makers are in your organization. You need to understand who is responsible for making decisions, who leads implementation, and who will champion the change for the long haul. 

Attorney Ken Zeko likens it to having a regulatory rolodex. He notes it’s important to identify – ahead of time – the department leaders and operational stakeholders in highly regulated areas and build relationships with them.  

Healthcare organizations’ highly regulated areas include Revenue Cycle, Quality, Lab and Pharmacy, Legal, HIM, and Compliance. And they’re critical departments to focus on for relationship building. Fostering relationships in these areas will help ensure that you’re in the loop when decisions are being made. 

Be at the right tables 

Getting ahead of organizational risk also requires being at the right table when strategic decisions are being made. That’s why Shawn DeGroot, president of Compliance Vitals, advises: “Relationship building should be a daily occurrence for CCOs.” 

“You can’t be a strategic advisor if you’re not at the strategy table,” adds Zeko. “Being prepared when a regulatory change comes in starts with compliance officers being visible across the organization. If compliance folks aren’t embedded enough with operational folks, they’re not aware to what extent they’re marshaling or assessing risks related to new regulatory changes.” 

Attorney Ken Zeko

Zeko says it’s helpful to hold monthly operational compliance committee meetings: “It’s a working committee to look into compliance issues so that the compliance officer isn’t the only one doing the heavy lifting.” 

Of course, relationships vary by department: the degree of regulatory change a department experiences affects its engagement with Compliance. As you form relationships across the organization, you can help leaders determine the most effective approach for mitigating risk in their respective area. 

Measure what matters 

Whether you’re talking with Pharmacy or Revenue Cycle colleagues, they want to know that you understand what matters to them. To demonstrate an understanding of operational leaders’ respective concerns, you should present metrics and business cases in a way that resonates with their motivators. 

“Know your audience in order to understand their definition of effectiveness,” advises Charles Mazer, director of Corporate Compliance at NewYork-Presbyterian. “Understanding who you’re speaking to is important because the relationship defines everything. If I’m speaking to an operations person, they don’t care how many reviews I’m doing. But the board cares. If I’m speaking to the board, the more reviews the better.” 

Charles Mazer, director of Corporate Compliance at NewYork-Presbyterian

The metrics you choose to evaluate your regulatory change management program will vary, depending on your audience. For a starting point on metrics to measure how well you’re managing regulatory change, consider the seven elements for compliance program effectiveness.  

Healthcare compliance officers often rely on the seven elements as key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure whether their organization’s compliance goals are achieved. Element-based KPIs are a useful gauge of whether compliance activities are achieving results. 

For example, a common organization-wide goal is requiring 100% of new employees to complete a Code of Conduct acknowledgment. Attorney Ken Zeko recommends another set of measurements: culturally impactful metrics. 

Examples of culturally impactful metrics include the number of Compliance roadshow sessions completed or meetings between the compliance officer and board members. As you customize metrics to your audiences’ specific needs, keep in mind how your recommendations will affect other areas of the business. 

Know the business 

Serving as strategic business partner to the larger organization involves knowing the business of the organization and how it generates revenue. NewYork-Presbyterian’s Charles Mazer explains how his team builds business acumen. 

“Our Compliance team is asked to complete a Revenue Cycle Academy,” Mazer says. “We need to be able to understand the business to work effectively in the space. Compliance is always tasked with explaining the benefit of acting compliantly to a business unit. It might not be revenue generating, but it’s risk mitigating. It’s what to do because it’s in your best interest.”  

Knowing the business involves making sure your recommendations are practical for other teams to implement. And identifying compliance champions is a way to make sure you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting. This is critical because your work doesn’t end when a new policy or procedure is adopted. 

“Artful communication is crucial, especially when you’re influencing other departments,” says Compliance Vitals President Shawn DeGroot. “Whenever something impacts the organization – and has a dramatic outcome that either reduced risk or improved business outcomes – identify compliance champions to hold up the people who reported the issues. If a physician is a compliance champion and advocate, it resounds throughout the organization! This approach not only builds relationships, it ensures that more than just the CCO is acting as the face of compliance and change management.” 

Compliance Vitals President Shawn DeGroot

Empower Compliance Officers to Drive Better Health and Business Outcomes

Developing influencer skills – and combining them with established processes for managing regulatory change – will best position you to drive better health and business outcomes for your organization. I recently moderated a panel at the HCCA’s Annual Compliance Institute addressing this topic with Shawn DeGroot, Charles Mazer and Ken Zeko.  

Our discussion generated useful tips on how compliance officers can establish standard processes and develop influencer skills to help their healthcare organizations mitigate risk. We also explored industry research on compliance professionals’ best practices for lessening organizational risk through regulatory change management. 

Key takeaways are in the white paper Empowering Compliance Officers to Drive Better Health and Business Outcomes. Download the report for insights on how to lessen risk and deliver value to your organization through strong regulatory change management. 

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Jerry Shafran

Jerry Shafran is the founder and CEO of YouCompli. He is a serial entrepreneur who builds on a solid foundation of information technology and network solutions. Jerry has founded, managed, and sold software and content solutions that simplify complex work. His innovations enable professionals to focus on their core business priorities.

The post Four Power Skills for Influence   first appeared on YouCompli.

Update: Unfortunately, the 2020 HCCA Compliance Institute has been cancelled by the HCCA. Read more on their website here: https://www.hcca-info.org/conferences/national/2020-compliance-institute/Coronavirus

It’s that time of year again – time for the HCCA’s Compliance Institute!

The youCompli team is heading to the heart of country music, Nashville. And nothing says country music like the star of our video. (Hint: Come by and say “Hello Dolly”)

Compliance “Dolly” will be at our booth on March 30^th, from 11am to 7pm. Stop by, say “hi”, and get a picture!

You can find us at Booth #618. And, if you book (and attend) a demo of our solution, you’ll receive, absolutely free, one of these fine T-shirts. (We don’t want to spoil your fun – the demo can be done after the show!)

youCompli helps you and your team ensure compliance and increase efficiency, so patient care stays front and center. Stay on top of changes, keep your team organized, and always know what compliance activity is (and isn’t) going on.

See you in Nashville!

The post youCompli Team Heads to HCCA Compliance Institute 2020 first appeared on YouCompli.

When it comes to maintaining your hospital’s compliance in the face of with ever-changing regulations, the struggle is real and expensive. Hospitals of all sizes spend boatloads of money on GRC and risk solutions to stay compliant. Plus, clinical teams working on compliance –physicians, nurses, technologists – spend inordinate amounts of time away from patient-care responsibilities trying to decipher and implement the latest rules.

Do you know just how expensive it is for hospitals to stay compliant and maintain the status quo? Let’s look at state-level expenses first.

State of Shock

Last year, the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems and Pacific University collaborated on a report titled Cost Burden: Evaluating the Financial Impact of Oregon State Regulatory Compliance on Oregon Hospitals and Health Systems. Some of its key findings:

• In 2018, Oregon hospitals spent a total of $126 million on labor to comply with over 2,000 rules created by the state
• Of these facilities, large hospitals each spent approximately $3.9 million on labor, and smaller hospitals each spent close
  to $0.5 million
• Staff salaries represented 85% of total compliance costs for all hospitals
• At large hospitals, 50% of compliance departments spent 40 hours or more a week overseeing state regulations
• Many new state laws and regulations are effective as soon as the governor signs them, giving hospitals no time to understand the new rules, train their staffs, or establish procedures — and instantly making them non-compliant

National Numbers

Costs skyrocket when hospitals in all 50 states try to meet federal regulations, as detailed in the 2017 AHA report, Regulatory Overload: Assessing the Regulatory Burden on Health Systems, Hospitals and Post-acute Care Providers. Here are just some of the average costs that community hospitals (160 beds) incurred in 2016:

• Nearly $7.6 million on administrative activities
• Almost $760,000 to meet meaningful use administrative requirements
• Around $411,000 in systems upgrades
• Approximately $709,000 annually on the administrative aspects of quality reporting

Naturally, the larger the hospital size, the greater the administrative costs. Hospitals with post-acute care beds paid $9 million, whereas large hospitals with at least 400 beds paid $18.8 million in administrative costs. Hospitals of all sizes also spent $3.1 million on administrative compliance activities related to conditions of participation for Medicare programs, plus another $1.6 million on billing and coverage verification.

In 2016, the administrative aspects of federal regulatory compliance worked out to $38.6 billion — or more than $47,000 per hospital bed. And every time a patient was admitted in 2016, hospitals would incur $1,200 in regulatory burdens alone. As high as the $38.6 billion figure is, it does not account for complying with regulations made by federal agencies, such as the FDA.

Thus, the “complete” costs of federal regulatory compliance for hospitals is likely much, much higher.

Simplifying Regulatory Compliance

The proliferation and vast amount of regulatory changes can easily exceed your hospital’s ability to understand and implement them in a timely manner. And if your hospital’s spending a lot of money but still can’t maintain compliance with state, federal, and agency regulations, that could spell disaster.

You need a more effective spend stat. Take a look at what youCompli can do to help you monitor, translate, act upon and track compliance activity throughout your hospital. Get started here.

The post The Inefficiency of the Status Quo first appeared on YouCompli.

New regulations are a fact of life in healthcare. But the head of your pharmacy or lab or revenue cycle department just wants to focus on patient care – not reading new regulations.

How would they react if you told them they can comply with ALL new regs without having to read them?

Recently, the Oregon Association of Hospitals & Health Systems (OAHHS) released a report showing that acute care inpatient hospitals must comply with over 2,000 rules created by the state (and that’s JUST the state).

Clinical workers usually bear the most responsibility when states (and others) pass new regulations. Clinical staff must:

• Assess a new regulation’s relevance to the organization,
• Determine what steps need to be taken to comply, and
• Implement the steps required to comply.

This creates big headaches for these folks, as it takes their time away from what they actually want to do: providing care.  Meet youCompli. youCompli software monitors, reads and translates regulations into easy-to-understand business requirements.  The requirements are delivered to the responsible party and you can keep track of all of it.

If you think it sounds too good to be true, click here and see what our clients are saying about youCompli.

Want to get started right now? Click here and let’s talk about how youCompli can help.

The post Minimize Regulatory Impact On Patient Care first appeared on YouCompli.

What an October!  In addition to all the Halloween fun, we processed over 100 new regulatory changes last month.

They covered both state and federal regulators and came in all shapes and sizes, but one stands out.

CMS decided to lump together seemingly unrelated concepts covering everything from multi-hospital QAPI programs and critical access hospitals to long-term care and autopsy services.

(84 FR 51732)

We’re experts at dealing with these large complex regs and I thought I would share a hint on how to deal with them more effectively.

We find it helpful to break the reg into more meaningful chunks. To do this start by analyzing the summary, you’ll usually find it in the preamble to most large regs.  That summary typically lists the different areas the regulator has targeted with a particular change.

Next group the different areas that tend to make sense (grouping should be done based on your organization’s structure)  into one “chunk,” while separating out the disparate areas into their own “chunk”. Breaking down a large regulation this way allows us to:

1. Pinpoint the individual functional areas of an organization being affected;
2. Tune in to specific issues involved with each functional area of an organization; and
3. Ensure an easy-to-understand business requirement is a result.

84 FR 51732 was a real “bear”, it resulted in 10 different business requirements.

If your organization is faced with a similar complex regulation, you too might benefit from breaking it down into smaller projects or “chunks” to ensure it is effectively implemented into your organization’s policies and procedures…or…let us do the work for you!

Click this link and sign-up for a 10-minute demo and see how you can comply without reading regs.

Schedule 10-minute demo

The post CMS Does It Again first appeared on YouCompli.

Do you have someone in your healthcare practice who can read and translate Regulish?

No that’s not a typo, we meant to type Regulish.

Regulish is the “language” healthcare regulators use to communicate with you. It includes a series of long complex words, phrases and numbers…lots of numbers.

Regulish is difficult to read and even harder to understand. (picture to the right is Klingon)

Most healthcare employees can’t understand Regulish. When they look at a regulation it appears to be mostly gibberish. Reading it creates frustration, often leading the reader to ignoring it, thus increasing your regulatory risk.

youCompli’s compliance experts read and translate Regulish into easy-to-understand business requirements. The requirements include:

* The ability to instantly decide if the regulation matters to you

* The specific tasks you need to complete to comply

* Detailed policies and procedures you’ll use to easily comply

Take 10-minutes of your time and learn how you can comply with ALL new regulations without having to read anymore Regulish.

10-Minute Demo Sign-Up

The post Understanding Regulish first appeared on YouCompli.

You’re responsible for creating and maintaining a culture of compliance in your organization.  You need to embed compliance into everyday workflows and set expectations for individual behavior across your organization.

This is impossible if you don’t know who the right people are in each area of your organization.

What you need is a Regulatory Rolodex^©, youCompli has one and you can have it for FREE.

We use this tool to identify and track 2 different types of individuals in each area of your organization.

• The person responsible for doing regulatory change work
• The person responsible for higher-level oversight to ensure the regulatory work gets done

youCompli delivers new regulatory requirements to both types of people (and to the compliance department) inside our software.  This allows the compliance department to have complete visibility into the whole compliance process.

To get your free copy of the Regulatory Rolodex^© provide the info below and we’ll send it to you.

[email-download-link namefield=”YES” id=”2″]

Interested in seeing how youCompli automates the whole regulatory compliance process?

Attend our 10-minute demo, click the link and select a date and time that is convenient for you.

10-minute demo

“All Rights Reserved”

The post Regulatory Rolodex first appeared on YouCompli.

While not named by the OIG as one of the “7 elements of an Effective Compliance Program” the ability to manage regulations directly affects 5 of the 7 actual elements (the 5 affected are listed at the bottom of this post).

So, you need to manage regulations effectively to have an effective compliance program.

When regulations change you (and many of your colleagues) need answers to one, two or all three of these questions.

1. Are we aware of all the new regs that might apply to us?

2. For the ones that do, what needs to be done to comply?

3. Did we do it?

To make this work easier and give you the ability to manage it, we suggest relying on a methodology to perform this work.  When we created our software, we developed Regulatory Compliance Lifecycle Management (RCLM).

RCLM is a methodology that if followed will give you the ability to answer the questions above and be able to demonstrate what was done to comply (assuming you keep track of it).

RCLM includes:

• Identification and documentation of new regulations

• Assessing its relevance to your organization

• Translation into business requirements, (specific activities required to comply)

• Communication of requirements to ALL stakeholders

• Execution of activities required to comply

• Monitoring and validation that required activities have been completed

• Demonstration of the steps taken above

Our software automates RCLM and makes compliance much easier.

If you’re interested in seeing how sign-up for our 10-minute demo by clicking the link and picking a date/time that is convenient for you.

#chaostoconfidence #StopReadingRegs

10-Minute Demo

5 Elements directly affected by regulatory changes

1. Implementing written policies, procedures and standards of conduct.
2. Conducting effective training and education.
3. Conducting internal monitoring and auditing.
4. Enforcing standards through well-publicized disciplinary guidelines.
5. Responding promptly to detected offenses and undertaking corrective action.

The post Can’t Have The 7 Elements Without This! first appeared on YouCompli.

The hot topic this year at the Health Care Compliance Association’s Compliance Institute, is innovation. Speakers who begin talking about anything from ethics and culture to the latest news, all seem to make their way to the role innovation plays at every level. And we agree.

Compliance Best Practices Include Finding Innovative Solutions

In fact, we couldn’t agree more. In this digital age, we find our day to day workload lightened by innovative solutions. Why shouldn’t our compliance practices? It’s invigorating. It’s just 2 days in, but we’re thrilled to be here and hope to meet other colleagues who share this point of view.

When we founded youCompli, we set out to make the entire process — from keeping up with regulation changes to implementing them — as easy as possible. We take pride in our innovative approach and have been delighted with our fellow compliance professionals’ response.

We all Share a Passion for Taking Care of People

Of course it’s always so good to be able to discuss the common values that drive us all — helping people! If we haven’t met yet, please stop by Booth #322. And if you’re not attending HCCA CI, let’s meet virtually – just request your 10-minute demo and we’ll look forward to meeting you and answering your questions, virtually.

youCompli makes complying with regulatory changes Easier, Faster and Reliable

The post Innovation is Hot at HCCA Compliance Institute first appeared on YouCompli.