HR compliance within hospitals and other healthcare settings is critical for the health and well-being of your patients. Recent Hospital closures have shown how non-compliance can have major consequences for organizations. By improving your HR compliance, you can ensure the smooth operation of your hospital and the delivery of high-quality patient care for years to come.
Understanding HR Compliance in Hospitals
HR compliance is the practice of ensuring your HR policies, procedures, and practices align with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards. Meeting the compliance needs set forth by various authoritative bodies, including The Joint Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Centers for Disease Control requires organizations to engage in a multifaceted and proactive approach that spans staff training and communication, robust documentation and workflows, and continuous adaptation to the ever-evolving regulatory landscape.
More specifically, workforce compliance ensures your employees are clear and safe to work. This requires continuously verifying healthcare licenses, certifications, and registrations against federal and state primary source data. Additionally, organizations should also monitor if employees are on federal and state exclusion lists, which prevent payment from being made to the excluded party, as well as any hospital or other healthcare provider where the excluded party provided services or was otherwise engaged. These lists include the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) List of Excluded Individuals and Entities (LEIE), General Services Administration (GSA) System for Award Management (SAM), and State Medicaid Exclusion data.
As a leader, it’s essential to ensure that your organization complies with these regulations to navigate the challenges of working with hospitals in the U.S. The expectations of patients and healthcare organizations are exceptionally high, and consistently exceeding them is key to staying competitive and maintaining trust as a hospital.
Legal and Financial Implications
The legal and financial implications of non-compliance in the US should encourage anyone to tighten their HR compliance procedures. Non-compliance can result in fines and lawsuits, which are widespread in the U.S. By analyzing the cost of compliance vs. non-compliance, you’ll soon see the positive financial impact of implementing effective HR compliance strategies in your hospital.
Ensuring Patient Safety and Quality of Care
To ensure the safety of your patients, one of the critical areas of concern is employee training. In such a busy environment with a lot of stress and pressure, you need your employees to feel highly confident in the work they are carrying out each day. Teaching them about compliance and safety protocols will help everyone in your hospital play their part in ensuring your business focuses on HR compliance.
Staff qualifications are another area to consider when evaluating HR compliance. Ensuring your staff are qualified and have the required credentials and licensing for their current jobs will keep you in compliance with state and national laws. There is a clear correlation between compliance and patient care quality, which should be one of the top incentives for everyone in your business to focus more on compliance.
Enhancing Hospital Reputation and Trust
Your hospital’s reputation shares a direct link to the business you receive and the trust your patients have in your services. The public perception of a hospital can be ruined with just one slip-up or incident of non-compliance. Showing the public that you are fully compliant with all regulations will help to boost trust and show them that you are somewhere to turn to during times of need. Within your local community, word-of-mouth marketing will spread the word about the care and attention you give to compliance and increase credibility with your current and future patients.
Showcasing accreditation and certifications on your website and in your physical building can be an excellent place to start when it comes to building trust and improving your reputation. Of course, you must ensure these certificates are all up to date and from accredited regulatory boards to show your commitment to offering the best services possible. Patients can easily research and understand the measures you’ve put in place to offer the best service possible and will feel more at ease trusting you with some of the biggest moments of their lives.
Implementing Effective HR Compliance Strategies
We recommend completing a complete review of your current HR compliance strategies before identifying the weak spots in your current programs. Developing and maintaining robust HR compliance programs is a team effort and requires continuous dedication to this task. Set up compliance checks at regular intervals and ensure your team gets into the routine of doing this frequently to avoid long-term challenges or missed checks. During this time of labor shortages within hospitals, one of the most significant issues is finding the time and resources to balance HR compliance and talent acquisition. Try to identify the key hires you need to make shortly and put extra effort into this to ensure you acquire team members who can support you with HR compliance.
Training and education for your staff is an ongoing process that requires total commitment from your leaders and employees. Incorporate regular updates into your meetings as refreshers and reminders of the importance of compliance issues. Finally, one of the best ways to improve your HR compliance procedures is to leverage software systems like EverCheck for improved hiring speed and overall efficiency. You’ll notice a huge improvement in efficiency, attention to detail, and overall compliance when you use modern systems that help automate many time-consuming processes.
Conclusion
HR compliance in hospitals is critical to building and maintaining trust with patients. Patients need to trust that they will receive the care they deserve, which you can prove with industry certifications and accreditations. We encourage hospital administrators to prioritize HR compliance to benefit their staff and patients. Compliance within the healthcare system has a huge impact on the care patients across the US receive, and the more dedicated hospitals are to this cause, the higher the standard of care will rise.
About EverCheck
EverCheck by Propelus is the leading solution that unlocks vital, automated primary source verified data such as licensure, certifications, exclusions, sanctions and debarments, and ongoing monitoring that are the most reliable, accurate, timely to ensure your workforce is compliant and in good standing to work at all times. Learn more about how we can support your healthcare HR team here.
