Your health care worker compliance rates can be a matter of life and death. If they —from custodians to surgeons—don’t understand why safety procedures and regulations are important to them and follow those policies appropriately, patients could pay the ultimate price.

Why Does Health Care Worker Compliance Matter?

Employees’ failure to comply with procedures and regulations can also cost health care providers financially.

Take reimbursement. If employees, whether medical billers and coders or clinical staff, aren’t meeting requirements to get that reimbursement, the health system suffers financially. If proper assessments aren’t done at the bedside—or they’re not documented properly—it means less revenue for your organizations (and that assessment could have helped the patient, too).

Another threat to patient safety and financials is data security. In 2017 alone, 40 health care organizations experienced data breaches, proving that the industry needs to strengthen security procedures. Focusing on employee compliance is key to achieving that, especially when employees are maintaining records and sending and saving data on mobile phones, tablets, laptops, emails and storage devices.

The average cost of a health care data breach is $380 per medical record and $3.62 million per incident to remedy, according to the 2017 Cost of Data Breach study. That $3.62 million average includes funds for patient notification, forensics, lawsuits, lost business, diminished brand value and HIPAA fines—about a quarter of the total cost. If you think your health care organization is immune, think again! In a prior year’s study, 90 percent of hospitals reported a data breach in the last two years.

But you don’t have to join that list.

Stay Safe

Developing and executing a comprehensive and engaging communications program not only helps your staff better understand compliance issues, it teaches them why it’s important. There’s an added benefit: employees who feel on top of their game and that their employer cares about their success are more engaged in their jobs. They’re happier and stay longer.

Employees might feel like compliance efforts are burdensome now, but when you take the time to explain why those efforts are crucial to protecting employees and patients in particular, your staff is more likely to comply. That might mean logging off the medical records system when they go to lunch or documenting that sepsis evaluation for the newly admitted patient. And then washing their hands. Because that’s compliance, too.

Want to talk about how engaging employee communications can improve patient outcomes, improve your organization’s financial health and defend it digital security threats? Email or call (317) 631-6400.