Why 20th Century Policy Management Won’t Work in the 21st

Bad habits in healthcare facilities die hard.

For example, up until 1996, patient privacy was loosely defined, and it wasn’t until the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) introduced new standards that the face of healthcare and how it is delivered in U.S. hospitals was changed.  

Your facility may even have copies of old protocols to prove a policy that seems so dated actually existed. Yet, despite creating safer environments, one day we might look back and laugh at another, equally inexplicable and potentially harmful practice that still happens.

We’re talking about the management of healthcare policies and procedures that many facilities continue to perform largely by hand, despite widespread agreement that paper and binder-based systems create confusion, errors, and inefficiencies.

This blog discusses three good reasons why it’s time to modernize your policy and procedure management practices and why those paper binders and shared drives need to become a thing of the past.

Reason 1: It’s too clunky

Healthcare compliance and policy management has become a complex, time-consuming, and cumbersome task that requires a simple solution.

PolicyStat’s digital authoring tools eliminate the inefficiencies and errors of manual document creation with a number of benefits that allow clients to quickly gain adoption and buy-in from users. These include:

• Automatic updating to ensure that all document contributors and reviewers are working with the latest version. This means no more version-wrangling and reconciliation.

• Digital approval workflows let teams collaborate on policy documents without the hassle of tracking comments and changes in Word files.

• Configurable notification and action-required settings ensure task clarity and accountability by assigning responsibility to individuals, departments, and/or the entire organization.

Reason 2: It takes too long

One of the most harmful time thieves when it comes to managing healthcare policies and procedures isn’t just the approval committee meetings themselves. It’s also the time it takes to schedule and reschedule them.

Now you can stay on top of policy compliance with tools that understand the realities of schedule conflicts and patient emergencies, and takes them out of the policy management process. When you implement the PolicyStat solution, you get a system that promises:

• Digital, cloud-based workflow solutions that eliminate log jams, because no one involved in the policy management process has to be in the same physical location for work to get started or be continued.

• Delivery of new or updated policy documents with signature acknowledgement and return functionalities, which put an end to long approval committee meetings.

• A solution that can be implemented in weeks, not months, paving the way for a smooth and quick transition.*

*Implementation time will vary depending on factors such as quality of the facility’s documents, how documents and folders are currently organized and accessed, and the organization’s ability to respond to requests for certain information and task approvals.

Reason 3: It costs too much

By this, we mean the opportunity costs involved when key staff are distracted from focusing on patient care.

We also mean the reputational and potential revenue costs of adverse events such as compliance deficiencies and accreditation delays or downgrades, any of which can be devastating to the financial health of your facility.

Furthermore, with the PolicyStat digital solution, huge chunks of your IT resources will not be consumed, and you will never be required to purchase hardware or make software updates. Instead, the following time and cost-saving elements are built in to help get you and your staff moving in the right direction:  

• PolicyStat’s intuitive editing, tracking, and searching tools don’t require hours of training for managers and staff to learn.

• PolicyStat’s solution lets any document be accessed in seconds from any Internet-enabled device. This allows anyone who needs a document to be able to retrieve it from anywhere at any time.

• HTML-formatted documents can be keyword-searched and quickly located during an audit or event that requires guidance for a critical or sensitive decision.

See the future of policy management

If you have two minutes, watch our demo to learn how you can automatically begin to shift the thousands of hours you’re spending on policy and procedure management into focusing more time on delivering exceptional patient care.

You can also contact us to set up a live demo. You’ll quickly see why we have a 99 percent client retention rate and a 99.8 percent customer support satisfaction score.