If your organization is like most these days, resources are tight and teams are lean. Efficiency becomes a key ingredient to an effective compliance program. Running lean doesn’t mean corners must be cut or best practices need to be sacrificed. Below are five ways to keep your healthcare professional (HCP) engagement process in great shape.
- Well Documented Policies and ProceduresTime is often short and business stakeholders need clear answers fast. Maintaining clear and current policies and procedures can go a long way toward keeping your operations streamlined. This will also facilitate best practices when qualifying, contracting, engaging and compensating your consulting HCPs. Documentation should be kept current and readily accessible, ensuring pre-determined update schedules, centralized document repositories and clear version control. This ensures your business partners will have easy access to the right information needed when engaging with HCPs.
- Automated SystemsAn automated engagement management system can help keep your organization compliant with state, federal and global regulations while also streamlining the overall process. A cloud-based tool can ensure all relevant information is housed in a central location with accessibility from any team member from any location. A system will keep your organization on track by facilitating inherent compliance controls so teams can focus on engaging with HCPs instead of pushing paper. A system will provide efficiency to both compliance and business teams.
- Consistent TrainingTraining may not be at the top of everyone’s list of favorite things to do, but it goes hand in hand with well documented policies and procedures. Its importance can’t be overstated. Well trained employees are confident. They know what to do, when to do it and they know where to find policy and procedure resources without having to chase down answers. Robust training also pays dividends when business teams do not need to run to compliance teams for every answer, freeing up your compliance team to manage other pressing responsibilities. Everybody wins.
- Audit and MonitoringIs your engagement process running smoothly? Are your business partners operating in a compliant manner? Do your policies and procedures need updates? Are there process gaps your training could help fill to make everyone’s life easier? These are questions an audit and monitoring program can help resolve. At best, cleaning up after identifying a problem with your HCP engagement process means rework and extra time your organization’s teams don’t have. At worst, it could mean an enforcement action. Identifying risks sooner rather than later helps to reduce time lost fixing things that have gone wrong and allows you to shore up shortfalls before they eat up more time going forward or cause even bigger problems. Data and easy-to-follow audit trails are essential to identify key areas.
- Detailed ReportingYou live in the compliance world so you may be in the weeds of your compliance program and engagement process. However, leaders in other parts of the business are not. The ability to produce detailed reports that provide high-level information related to your interactions with HCPs needed for oversight, budgeting, functional area needs and officer certifications, among other things, is vital to keeping your company leaders informed and educated. While reports and visual aids can be created manually, it is very time consuming, especially when they are needed monthly or even weekly. An automated system with embedded analytics functionality that holds all of your HCP engagement data and is capable of producing detailed reports in real time can provide leadership with what they need and save you precious time in the process.
Engagement processes and compliance programs have a lot of moving parts. These steps can help you established a plan, implement best practices and, together with tools available in the market that can help automate HCP engagement and reporting processes, increase efficiency across your organization. If you are interested in learning more about how MediSpend’s Engagement Manager solution can help your company mitigate risk with global HCP engagements, contact us today.
Katie Jacyna
Director, Product Management
September 9, 2020