Roy Snell, CEO of the Heath Care Compliance Association and the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics spoke recently with Healthcare Finance News Editor René Letourneau about compliance trends in 2012.
What will be the biggest compliance trend for 2012?
Compliance is not a complex concept. Auditing, monitoring, investigating, reporting, educating, disciplining, risk assessment and legal analysis have been done forever. The problem is that most health systems have these functions structured in a silo and the entities do not communicate well.
They are now creating better-coordinated compliance programs. The reason for it is because it appears to be more efficient and effective to have people working together in a system. It eliminates duplication and just makes sense.
What are the benefits of restructuring compliance functions?
Before, everyone did their little piece, but when it came to fixing and preventing problems, it just didn’t happen. No one had ultimate accountability or authority. Now we are essentially taking all these things we did before that were in silos and saying one person is going to have the responsibility of coordinating the resources.
Compliance programs are taking resources that used to collectively say ‘it’s not my job’ and coordinating areas so that now it’s everyone’s job to make sure a problem is fixed and controls are put into place so it doesn’t happen again. It makes it less likely that the ball will get dropped.
Are there other trends that you anticipate for 2012?
People in healthcare compliance are beginning to hang out with compliance peers in other industries because they can learn different approaches and new techniques. And, frankly, it’s just interesting. In the future, they will spend more time networking and interacting to learn from others who may have further developed elements of their compliance programs because of their industry’s risk factors. By spending a lot of time with these folks, you can get some of their tools and methodologies.