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Protect your facility in the face of disaster

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, July 25, 2007

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One way to save time and money is to integrate your HIPAA compliance program with your other compliance programs. But too many organizations have failed to do this as effectively as they could, sometimes even maintaining a completely separate effort for HIPAA. However, there may be more synergies than some organizations realize. Both HIPAA and other compliance efforts-whether for fraud and abuse, state regulations, or The Joint Commission-require ongoing staff training. It makes sense to combine these efforts as much as possible so that staff members aren't bogged down with too many training sessions. Take these money-saving tips into account:

• Combine your hotlines. Some organizations have separate hotlines for HIPAA concerns and for fraud and abuse. That's a recipe for losing track of important complaints or concerns, because a compliance officer dealing with just fraud and abuse might not recognize a HIPAA concern. Train a single person or team to triage those calls and route them to the right department.
• Have compliance and privacy personnel to work together. When it comes to responding to possible HIPAA violations, compliance officers already have expertise conducting investigations, handling staff discipline, if necessary, and also dealing with patient concerns.
• Ask compliance officers to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment each year. Have these assessments consider the totality of an organization's regulatory requirements and risks. Make sure to include HIPAA.

To get more information, go to Briefings on HIPAA (BOH). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire July issue of BOH. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of BOH have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their July issue.

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