How to Optimize Your Compliance Program by Ditching Paper

It’s not uncommon for organizations to create a compliance program, brush the dust off of their hands and go, “There! Finished!” and leave things that way for eternity. But, “set it and forget it” compliance puts your organization at risk. So, when it comes to your organization’s compliance, the best thing to do is to continually search for opportunities to optimize. Usually, the smoother your program runs the easier it is for you to do your job, too. One area that you can probably improve right now is to slowly transition from paper to something a little more modern.

Paper is for the Trees

Now, I’ll be honest with you, there’s no rule or regulation that says you can’t run an effective compliance program with paper and spreadsheets. But, if you look at the most effective compliance programs, they use technology to its fullest capacity. And seriously, why would you want to organize and store hundreds of sheets of paper when you could access your entire program with the click of a button? It’s better for the trees, better for your organization and so much easier for you! It’s a win-win-win! Triple win.

Ditch Your Dusty Policy Binder

For some, this might be as simple as getting rid of the paper policy binder (the one gathering dust on your bookshelf next to your family photos at the Grand canyon) and posting all your policies to an intranet or other digital forms for employees or even externally for customers and business partners. This can help keep the most current policies accessible to those needing the information. It can also help you quickly search for correct policies by using a keyword or phrase. Or, even better than posting policies electronically, would be using technology for receiving and recording an affirmative response that employees have reviewed the policy and will agree to follow it. These are often referred to as electronic attestations and they are a great way to distribute required policies and monitor responses, or attestations, of employees who will follow the policy. Having a record of this can be one measure of an effective compliance program.

Use Online Training for Post-Training Assessments

Another way to use technology is for your training. Who doesn’t love a good training sesh? Online training can be an efficient way to distribute training and record post-training assessment results and completion rates (or even more importantly, incompletion rates so you can manage those who haven’t completed the training). Now, it probably shouldn’t be the only training you do, but it’s great in addition to your in-person trainings. Today’s healthcare environment is busy and being able to complete compliance training at any time, night or day, can be a great advantage. Compliance training is accessible nowadays via your mobile device so you are just a click away from completing your training. Tools to manage the assigning, monitoring, tracking completion and post-training assessment scores are also available to compliance officers and managers so they can manage these tasks more easily as well. It’s not just about the end-user more easily accessing the training, it’s also about the compliance professional more easily managing the process.

Remember, “set it and forget it,” isn’t a thing in compliance. If you want to be effective, you must continually search for ways to improve.

To learn more about ways to optimize your compliance program, check out our short and FREE eBrief, 4 Signs Your Compliance Program Could be Doing Better.