4 Key Benefits of Keeping Your Policies and Procedures Current

Whether you’re responsible for the management of policies and procedures at a large hospital, post-acute, or acute healthcare facility, you know that healthcare is a highly complex industry. That complexity is largely driven by the fact that healthcare involves human beings. It’s likely your staff has the best intentions when it comes to delivering highly reliable patient care, but the old adage about best intentions is an old adage for a reason.  

Current and up-to-date policies and procedures give your staff more to operate on than best intentions. They provide a model for acceptable behavior and give specific direction on required behaviors in specific instances. In doing so, they reduce risk to patients and your organization.

Keeping policies and procedures current not only reduces risk, but it also prepares you for your next on-site survey with the Joint Commission and can help you take steps toward becoming a high-reliability organization. The Joint Commission’s mission is to transform healthcare into a high-reliability industry by developing effective solutions to healthcare’s most critical safety and quality problems. We all know that high-reliability is a long-term goal, but are you confident that your staff is actually using the most current policies and procedures, rather than simply acting with best intentions?

One way to improve your confidence that your staff has access to the most current policies and procedures is to implement policy and procedure management software. If your policies and procedures are scattered in Microsoft Word documents on a shared drive somewhere in your system, it’s likely your policies and procedures are out of date and inaccessible. While it might sound far-fetched in today’s technology-driven world, the shared drive scenario is not uncommon.

Keeping your policies and procedures current and making them accessible to your entire staff is just one crucial benefit of using a software platform like PolicyStat. Here are four other key benefits you’ll get from simply keeping policies and procedures current:

1. During on-site surveys, you’ll have the ability to demonstrate to a surveyor when a policy was changed or approved, and who was responsible.
2. You’ll give your surveyor confidence that you’re reviewing policies and procedures regularly to keep up with constantly changing regulations.
3. Your staff members will be happier. A well-known but often overlooked fact about happy staff members is that they want to know that they are making a positive impact in the workplace. Clearly written policies and procedures will help them understand what is expected of them so they can deliver better patient care.
4. It will become easier to identify gaps in your progress toward becoming a high-reliability organization and improve compliance.   

These are only a few of the benefits of keeping policies current by using a platform like PolicyStat. One thing is certain: If your staff isn’t using the most current policies and procedures, then your organization is at risk, and you’re likely losing time and money. And in today’s competitive healthcare environment, no one can afford losses. So give us a call today at 317-644-1296 or learn more by downloading our free guide: 4 Key Elements to Successfully Implement Policy and Procedure Management Software.