Automating Compliance from the Inside Out.
A Healthicity customer success story.
Equitas Health
Equitas Health (formerly AIDS Resource Center Ohio) is a regional not-for-profit community-based healthcare system founded in 1984. Its expanded mission has made it one of the nation’s largest HIV/AIDS, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) healthcare organizations. With 13 offices in 10 cities, it serves more than 67,000 individuals in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia each year through its diverse healthcare and social service delivery system focused around: primary and specialized medical care, dental, behavioral health, HIV/STI prevention, advocacy, and community health initiatives.
Employees
250
Organization
Healthcare System
Challenges
Training and Automation
Answer
Compliance Manager
Challenges
When Trent Stechschulte, Compliance Officer and Legal Counsel, started at Equitas Health, compliance was managed manually and trainings, if they were being conducted at all, were conducted in-person. Our manual approach to compliance management was both time-consuming and inefficient.
Mr. Stechschulte knew that he could save himself and his organization time and money if he could automate core functions and streamline their program by doing away with paper trails, email tracking and excel spreadsheets. He set out in search of software that could simplify their program by having all core features in one piece of software. In short, he wanted to create a more efficient compliance program.
Answer
Stechschulte’s first challenge was to find a software solution that matched his needs and those of Equitas Health. He knew that incident management, trainings, attestations, and a document center, were must-have features that he couldn’t do without. Soon after, the answer just happened to fall right into his lap. “I heard about Compliance Manager from my boss, who had met Healthicity at a healthcare conference and thought that the products were a good fit for us.”
After meeting with the Healthicity team for a personal, on-site, demonstration of Compliance Manager, Stechschulte knew that he’d found the perfect solution because “the features, incident reporting, and training all mirrored my expectations.”
Implementation
Once Stechschulte chose Compliance Manager as his solution, implementation was painless and simple, “Healthicity uploaded our staff for us. All we had to do was give employees a password and instructions to log in. The team at Healthicity was easy to work with and they always got back to me quickly, which was wonderful.”
Results
Stechschulte said that using Compliance Manager is “user-friendly and the training and incident reporting are some of my favorite features. Moving forward I want to take more advantage of the audit function, too.”
Using software improved compliance at Equitas Health by allowing Stechschulte to streamline the program, “Since automating compliance, we’ve been able to improve efficiency, policies and procedures, and reduce our risk.” Managing an effective compliance program requires wearing many different hats. Training, a notoriously labor-intensive job, can fall by the wayside as a result. “Before Compliance Manager, our trainings were not happening, we didn’t have a process for onboarding and policy sign off. Now we do it all through Compliance Manager. The software automates and provides the reporting every compliance program needs, but rarely can get without manual entry,” said Stechschulte.
Incident reporting, a crucial element for a healthy compliance program, mitigates the risk of fines and uncovers non-compliance. Ideally, it should be easy for members of an organization to report incidents. This allows a Compliance Officer, like Stechschulte, to quickly take action to fix any compliance issues within the organization. “We’ve increased our incident reports 10 - fold. Prior to Compliance Manager we had an average of 5 open incidents and now we have an average 25 to 30.” By implementing a simple way to report incidents, Equitas Health is no longer in the dark about potential threats to their organization.
Summary
Healthcare is a dynamic industry and compliance is complicated. One of the largest challenges of healthcare compliance is that the future of major policy initiatives are unknown. But Stechschulte has a plan for how to continuously stay ahead of the curve: Using innovative technology. By streamlining his compliance efforts he has saved his organization time and money while running a more effective compliance program. Most importantly, Equitas Health can continue to contribute to the health of their community without the fear or risk of being noncompliant.