A Better Way to Manage Healthcare Compliance for Building Owners and Facility Managers
According to the 2016 CMS Report to Congress, physical environment standards were the most commonly cited deficiencies in 2014 and 2015. To address this challenge, the Joint Commission, the largest accreditation organization in the United States, published the eight-most frequently cited physical environment standards.
This is a good start, but addressing Environment of Care and Life Safety comes down to more than simply understanding which standards you need to look out for.
Healthcare standard compliance relies mainly on effective document management. After all, you may have conducted every test, inspection, and safety drill accurately and on time, but without proper documentation, your facility is noncompliant.
This week ARC® introduced a new Healthcare Compliance mobile dashboard so healthcare facility professionals have a single source for compliance documentation.
How does transferring your compliance documents from paper to a digital solution make managing healthcare compliance easier?
Set Compliance Alerts
Software makes keeping track of every one of the hundreds of Environment of Care and Life Safety standards easy. Simply set up alerts for every inspection, test and drill that you need. That way, you can ensure that every required compliance-related activity is taken care of on time. Even if the facility manager is out of the office, temporary staff can have their finger on the pulse of facility compliance.
Schedule Compliance-Related Activities
Scheduling vendors and tracking due dates for various compliance-related activities is another task that quickly gets out of hand when information is not centralized. Not so with technology that you can set to automate email alerts for ensuring work by outside vendors gets done.
Validate maintenance, testing and inspection
Proper documentation of compliance activities is just as important as the activities themselves. Relying on paper-based solutions like binders, or even disks opens you up to human error. If one thing is filed incorrectly, you’ll be left scrambling to piece together your information.
Current Building Information in Seconds
Any facility manager who has gone through an accreditation audit has seen the rest of their facility operation screech to a halt. While it’s impossible to avoid some disruption, digitization of healthcare compliance helps facility managers maintain compliance, pass audits and get back to their daily workflow as quickly as possible.
Beyond all the technical bells and whistles, digital information management solutions present your facility as a leader amongst your peers. You exude professionalism by accessing information on any device, instead of panic by fumbling for documents in a dingy plan room.
How else could cloud-based information management help facility managers manage healthcare compliance?
Watch this Healthcare Compliance webcast to see industry experts discuss these solutions in action.
