Manage: Involve colleagues to ensure your organization complies with regulatory changes

Managing healthcare regulatory changes is a balancing act. Oftentimes, the Compliance department is responsible for regulatory oversight, project management, and support with individual departments handling the day-to-day management of regulatory requirements. This approach makes it difficult to involve the right people in a regulatory change process and to keep track of the steps they take to comply.

YouCompli helps you manage the whole process of responding to regulatory changes. With our simple tools you can easily plan your response, involve the right people, and track progress. (Read how YouCompli empowered the Compliance department to better manage regulatory change and deliver greater value to the hospital system.)

In this Clip Scott Borsuk explains how YouCompli helps manage regulatory changes by offering tools to assist in preparing and responding to new regulations.

Watch more videos on this topic here and see how YouCompli can help your organization

Jumpstart your response to regulatory changes

Once you’ve decided a regulation applies to your organization, use YouCompli to manage your response. YouCompli provides:

  • Clear business requirements and tasks: For every regulation you take on, YouCompli generates a complete set of legally validated business requirements, tasks, and deadlines
  • Sample documents: Our analysts write model procedures and tools to simplify your completion of the required task.  Download these legally validated expert tools and model procedures and customize them for your own organization.  
  • Specific roles for your colleagues: build a team for each regulatory change based on your actual needs. You can assign tasks to colleagues based on their functional area, their physical location, their role in the compliance initiative, and the nature of the regulation.

Involve the right people

  • Assignments and deadlines: Assign ownership and oversight of tasks to different department heads, functional leaders, or specialists. YouCompli prompts these users to accept, reject, or reassign the task by a stated deadline. All actions are logged in the system and the assigning party receives progress updates.
  • Task instructions: if a new regulation will require your organization to submit a form to a regulator and/or modify a procedure, YouCompli lays out the specific tasks to fulfill the requirement. Users simply follow the on-screen prompts to complete the tasks.
  • Accountability: If no action is taken by the deadline, YouCompli automatically follows up with the assigned parties. The task cannot be marked as complete until all required actions have been recorded in the system.

Manage and track the entire process

  • Real-time updates: YouCompli clearly displays the open, in progress, and completed tasks for the regulation as well as the responsible parties. Simply click into any task to review what’s been done and who still has work to do.
  • Email notifications: you can review the task to ensure it has been completed to your satisfaction. Complete audit trail of all the steps taken, including any uploaded files.
  • Status reports: Use standard and customizable reports to quickly show your progress toward complying with relevant regulations.

A complete regulatory change management solution

YouCompli is the only healthcare compliance solution that addresses all stages of regulatory change management. It helps you know what regulations are coming out from agencies you care about. It helps you decide whether those regulations and changes apply to you. It gives you the tools to manage your response to regulatory changes, and it makes it easy for you to verify that your organization put forth best efforts to stay in compliance.

Want a real-life example of regulatory change management supported by YouCompli? Read the case study of one West-Coast health system adapting to the public health emergency.

Decide: YouCompli helps your organization make easy regulatory decisions

Before YouCompli, Compliance Officer Scott Borsuk said he “probably spent six to eight hours a week reading regulations, then copying and pasting them” to share with colleagues. Read the Western Maryland Health System case study.

“It’s not enjoyable reading,” Borsuk noted.

But he had to read closely to be sure he properly analyzed the regulation to see if it applied to him.

Simplify decision-making

“We were not confident that we were catching everything, we had the documents but didn’t know if we missed anything. At the end of the day, we didn’t know if we were making the right changes or not.” – Scott Borsuk, Chief Compliance Officer

Borsuk knew he needed a better system and a stronger approach to managing regulatory change. That’s where YouCompli came in. With YouCompli, Borsuk can easily decide if a regulation applies to his hospital system and how to comply.

YouCompli makes it easy for you to decide which regulatory changes apply to your organization and which tasks need to be performed in order to comply.

In this clip Scott Borsuk explains what regulatory change management is, and how YouCompli assisted his hospital system in achieving desired results.

Watch more videos on this topic here and see how YouCompli can help your organization

Regulatory analysis to help you decide

  • For each requirement associated with a regulation, YouCompli creates a few relevance questions. Users may be asked, for instance, “Is your organization a Medicare provider?” These relevance questions are followed by tips generated by YouCompli to help make your decisions easier.
  • We can do this because our analysts read entire regulations, flag relevant changes, and translate technical legal documents into easy-to-understand business requirements.
  • If you decide the regulation is not relevant, YouCompli marks it “complete” and removes it from your active tasks.
  • All our analysis is checked by Horty Springer, the nation’s leading health care law firm.
YouCompli’s simple interface makes it easy to decide if a regulation is relevant to your organization.

Get expertise from colleagues

Sometimes the relevance questions stretch beyond your expertise as a Compliance leader. In those cases, use YouCompli to get the answer from colleague with the right expertise.

  • Use the workflow tool to assign a complex relevance question to a subject matter expert
  • YouCompli allows you to maintain a directory of subject matter experts who provide compliance leadership within their departments
  • The workflow tool also tracks responses and lets your colleague decline or answer the question right in the tool.

A complete audit trail for your relevance decisions

YouCompli tracks all of your relevance decisions over time, so you can see which regulations and changes applied to your organization and why (or why not!)

  • All responses to decision criteria, including usernames and date stamps, are recorded in YouCompli to become part of the official record and the compliance audit trail
  • The log also captures the reasons for rejecting the requirement or proceeding to the next phase of the workflow.
  • YouCompli clients can access the complete audit trail at any time to review previous decisions and the reason for making that decision.

Great decisions help you manage regulatory changes

Once you know about a regulatory change and you’ve used YouCompli’s decision criteria to decide that a regulation applies to you, you’re ready to respond. YouCompli helps you manage the tasks necessary for compliance. And it helps you verify that your organization has put forth best efforts to stay in compliance.

Interested in how a healthcare system used YouCompli to decide which regulatory changes apply? Check out this case study from the Western Maryland Health System.

Compliance officers reflect on COVID pivots and preparing for the end of the public health emergency

Featured speakers: Craig Bennett, Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer, Boston Medical Center; Rachel Lerner, Esq., General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer, Director, Center for the Prevention of Elder Abuse and Neglect, Hebrew SeniorLife; Maria Palumbo, Chief Compliance & Privacy Officer, Lawrence General Hospital. Moderated by Larry Vernaglia 

Bennett, Lerner and Palumbo addressed the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association’s Healthcare Legal Compliance Forum in December 2021. (Read a summary.) This recap of their remarks looks at how their Compliance teams responded to COVID and have continued to partner with their organizations to manage regulatory change. It also looks at regulatory changes they are planning for in 2022. To access the full session recording, please contact the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association.  

Initial COVID response

The panel reflected on their organizations’ initial response to COVID. “All of us had to pivot on a dime,” said Bennett. “We hadn’t had an opportunity to plan for it. Instead, we worked daily that first quarter to make sure we were as compliant as we could possibly be.” He was part of a team that looked at various waivers, platform security, privacy and other issues affected by the public health emergency to provide care safely.  

Lerner had a similar experience. “We immediately convened interdisciplinary committee so we could make changes quickly. Telehealth was really new territory for us, and we had to look at our outpatient medical practice, and home- and community-based care,” she said. “Tracking COVID 19 waivers was a team sport between Legal and Compliance. We broke down some silos, and that may be one good lasting benefit of this experience.”  

Palumbo and her colleagues focused on creating templates and consistency for documentation to make things as straightforward as possible for clinicians. That included having them track their patient contact time in minutes rather than defaulting to 20-minute increments. “We’re auditing these processes now to be sure we’re prepared when it gets looked at externally.”  

Accessibility concerns and solutions

Palumbo illustrated how healthcare organizations had to respond to the specific needs of their communities. “Our population tends not to have computers or printers at home,” she said. It wasn’t enough to deliver COVID test results to the portal, because people needed printed results to return to work or school. Without a printer, they were stuck. “We were like the take-out line at a restaurant – we not only have to contract with the state to provide nine-lane testing, we also have a multiline drive up for picking up your covid test results because people need that hard paper.”  

Building a culture of compliance

Bennett reflected on the tremendous amount of change and adaptation healthcare staff managed over the past two years. “I have to commend all hospital staff in being able to pivot and not missing a beat,” he said. His organization paused or reprioritized certain issues, but they maintained a focus on complying with regulations. That meant checking in with people regularly. That helped him assess whether people were getting the support and resources they needed related to their work. He expects to continue looking for ways to support staff. “We’ll continue to try to add flexibility to meet the needs of our staff and the needs of our patients and organization.” 

Palumbo, too, is working to meet people where they are at. She recently “camped out in the cafeteria,” she said. “I couldn’t believe the results: About 350 people came to talk to me, including residents, physicians, surgeons, nurses, case managers, and housekeeping staff.” They asked about patient privacy and other compliance issues. “So much came up during COVID but we didn’t stop to work through everything or stop to talk to each other. I’ll try to do that at least once a quarter.”  

New compliance issues

Palumbo walked through some upcoming regulatory changes she’s watching. This included the Medicare Final Physician Fee Schedule and noted that the Appropriate Use Criteria changes are delayed until the January first that follows the end of the pandemic. She encouraged everyone to understand the documentation requirements for using nurse practitioners for some portion of care as well as the changes to billing for surgeon and ICU provider time.  

New rules also allow audio-only telehealth visits for behavioral health as long as the patient wants it and the physician documents it properly.  

Balancing privacy, efficiency, safety, and cybersecurity

Lerner continues to address privacy concerns related to COVID testing and contact tracing. “We were working so hard to limit the spread of the disease in our senior living facilities,” she said. “It was hard to navigate contact tracing and privacy.” Now she is addressing cybersecurity insurance requirements, for her own organization and making sure vendors have sufficient insurance. “Moving to remote workforces and telehealth, the cybersecurity exposure is higher than it’s ever been,” she said. “For instance, people working from home might want to print documents, but we have to keep them from printing PHI at home or mailing things insecurely when someone can’t come pick it up.”  

Managing regulatory change

Lerner said she spends a lot of time looking at regulatory changes to understand their implications to her organization. “It can take us a long time to decide ‘does this apply to us?’ And then figure out what to do with it. Then we have to figure out what to do with that information in bits and pieces. It is certainly a complex, ever-changing universe on that front.” She spoke of Compliance’s key role in knitting together all that information to help the organization act on it and integrate it into daily processes.  

YouCompli sponsored MHA’s 2021 Healthcare Legal Compliance Forum. We provide a complete solution to help healthcare compliance organizations manage regulatory change. Find out more about YouCompli.  

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