By streamlining your processes and removing redundancies across departments, your healthcare organization can make compliance less costly and more effective.
Ensuring that your firm is taking the necessary steps to enact proper compliance procedures is a headache for many organizations; with the added regulations such as HIPAA that companies in the healthcare industry must contend with, compliance can become even more burdensome. Fortunately, your healthcare organization has the power to make compliance easier by streamlining its processes and removing redundancies across departments.
The problem many health organizations face with compliance are often at least partially their own fault. Perhaps you think that the employee who is most knowledgeable about a particular piece of the compliance puzzle should be responsible for that part, spreading compliance functions out across departments; after all, it makes sense that HR should oversee HIPAA compliance since they have the most experience with HIPAA procedures, right? In actuality, spreading the responsibility for compliance across your company can lead to communication errors, coordination difficulties, and additional cost overruns.
What many organizations miss is that regulations such as PCI and HIPAA actually have more in common than not. At their heart, these regulations are both about security: the security of cardholders and the safety of patients. If you choose to streamline your compliance processes rather than spread them across different departments, your organization will be better positioned to take advantage of the similarities between regulations and reduce the cost of compliance.
A streamlined compliance structure will help your team avoid an all too common cost drain: redundancies in spending on tools, programs, and data collection. Let’s say you’ve tasked your IT department with PCI compliance and are having your HR department handle conforming with HIPAA regulations, and both agencies realize that they need file monitoring software to meet their compliance requirements. By spreading your compliance processes across departments that don’t naturally communicate well with one another, your organization will needlessly incur the cost of two file monitoring programs when one would have sufficed. Now imagine this unnecessary duplication occurring, again and again, wasting valuable time, resources and money.
How can your organization avoid these costly redundancies? By streamlining your compliance process, your team can take a more holistic approach to risk management and security, removing the need for duplication of spending and effort. From this starting point, you can look to forge further efficiencies, such as adjusting your compliance audits to run on the same cycle to cover separate reporting requirements at the same time. Having a sound compliance process will always require time and effort, but your organization can take steps to make it less arduous.
If you aren’t confident that your healthcare organization is doing all it needs to for compliance, security and risk management, Alvarez Technology Group can help. Our team of experts can review your procedures and see if there are any opportunities to make your processes more efficient. Contact us today at (831) 753-7677 or [email protected] to learn more.
