Walk into a hospital, pharmaceutical company, or bank, and you’ll see the usual. You’ll see doctors with patients, scientists working in the lab, and bankers engaging in transactions. What you won’t see is the massive infrastructure that needs to exist to ensure that each and every one of those actions is compliant with hundreds (if not thousands) of regulations.
The technology that no one sees but that has become hidden but integral to regulated industries is invisible to anyone not working in those industries.
An Unappreciated Burden
What people don’t think about is that a mid-sized healthcare organization today is likely to need to think about HIPAA compliance, state medical board compliance, CMS conditions of participation, Joint Commission requirements, and dozens of internal requirements alone. They aren’t even thinking about all of the different certifications that might be applicable to healthcare organizations in general or those in the geographical region in which they practice. And even worse, each one of these has its own needs for documentation, training, audit trails, and more.
The old ways of doing this sort of thing, in spreadsheets, in shared drives, in loose paper binders, etc., all fail in the face of requirements of this scale. Someone remembers to update the policies but forgets to tell the other department. Training documents get lost. An auditor asks for documentation related to a situation that happened two years ago and all the compliance officer can do is apologize that they can’t find it. And while this section discusses “hypotheticals,” these are all real-life examples happening in organizations that still use “old-fashioned” ways of keeping track of compliance.
The Platforms That Enable Compliance Operations
Most organizations have at least moved to platforms to keep this all organized. Not just any platforms; platforms dedicated to this kind of work. Platforms that manage everything from policy libraries to who is compliant, who isn’t, tracking changes in regulations, incidents, and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, tracking complete audit trails. Compliance Software is what allows many regulated businesses to function these days.
These platforms do more than just house information; they actively manage it. If regulations change, these systems can flag policies that need to be updated, send them to the appropriate departments, track the changes that are made, and alert anyone who needs to be trained on these changes once they’re made. Without systems like this, Compliance Officers would have no time left in their day to do anything other than try to keep track of what needs to get done.
The Automation That Saves Organizations
One of the most important changes these systems make possible is removing human error from the repetitive tasks associated with routine compliance issues. For instance, many employees in a healthcare organization need to have certain certifications that expire on different schedules. Tracking these certifications can be done easily by an automated system. Asking employees to remember each of their colleagues can quickly become an exercise in futility. Someone will remember; someone will forget. Someone will get sick; someone will leave the organization.
Automated systems can prevent these problems by tracking them and sending reminders. First, they can send reminders to comply with certifications and the like. If these are ignored, they can escalate the messages until someone gets the attention of someone who needs to update their documentation. The same sorts of processes can also be implemented for policies.
When a policy changes, organizations need confirmation from everyone in the organization that they read and understand the policy. It’s impossible for someone to manually keep track of that for hundreds or thousands of employees. Automated systems can by flooding employees with policies as soon as they are available and tracking who has accessed them. Then, organizations can quickly generate reports that show the hundred percent compliance for which they are responsible.
The Preparation Required for Audits
Audits in regulated industries are no picnic. They aren’t even friendly conversations. Instead, they involve auditors sifting through documents and asking for information related to timeframes that go back years. Auditors might ask for anything from copies of incidents that are related to the completion of a specific training (such as a policy that just changed) to specific versions of policies that were required during specific timeframes. Auditors want documentation related to incidents with specific outcomes and samples of what was done in the future to avoid those incidents.
Companies that use systems to manage compliance can pull this information within minutes. Organizations still relying on old methods are left scrambling. There’s a big difference between someone getting someone relevant to the audit information in seconds to return phone calls and document timeframes on audits visits versus another organization being forced to reconstruct information from emails and search for documents in cabinets.
The Flow of Information That Needs to Go Out
One of the challenges for regulated industries is getting information about a policy or information about compliance regarding an incident out to everyone in the organization. In many cases, different roles require different compliance training or may not need it at all. In others, different practices need to be in place regarding different roles. Additionally, often everyone is on a different schedule working at different locations.
Platforms that have been developed for this purpose can send requests role by role rather than to every employee in an organization that may not be applicable to them at all. Technologies can send alerts by role rather than by employee; mobile devices can be utilized instead of expecting employees to check their phones or computers on a schedule.
What This Means for Professionals in Charge of Compliance
The professionals in charge of compliance in regulated industries are not “paper pushers.” They work in unique challenges within an ever-evolving field with regulations that overlap one another. They have to figure out how to keep their organizations compliant with limited resources and personnel.
Technologies have changed their jobs from administrative level tasks and getting organized to become high level decision makers within their organizations. Instead of prepping for auditors prior to their visits for days on end, the systems retrieve information automatically so they can spend their time better used, such as learning how to better serve their customers by analyzing the data that is retrieved.
The shift to becoming higher-level professionals rather than being at an administrative position has helped these professionals become even more valuable, and it increases their effectiveness within these roles.
