Do your employees glaze over at the mention of policies and procedures? Policies in healthcare are ever-changing and effect not only a hospital, but its patients. Healthcare compliance managers are regularly met with the challenges of not only distributing policy changes, but making sure employees understand and practice new procedures. Add that onto the stress of handling audits, and you’ve got a pretty full plate. Luckily, you’re not alone, many people like you are using enterprise content management (ECM) systems help you make sure your hospital is running safely and efficiently.
There are a lot of different ways ECM solutions can ease the facilitation of procedures and policies and assist you in promoting consistency in the workplace.
- You’ll save time and money when you can quickly and effectively disseminate policy changes to everyone at the same time. When you update a policy in your ECM software, it will automatically alert your employees that changes have been made. Employees can then easily review those amendments through either the ECM or their current business application with an ERP integration. If electronic medical records policies and procedures is your thing, it might be helpful to know that ECMs can integrate with EMRs as well.
- Alerting employees of changes is only half the battle. Electronic policy management also helps to ensure employee awareness and reduces risk of noncompliance by allowing you to track whether updates have been read. You can even make sure policies are not only viewed, but also understood by including tests and surveys with your updates.
- ECM doesn’t stop at distribution and implementation – it also speeds up the creation of your policies by digitizing and automating time consuming parts of the process. For example, when you update a policy on your computer, ECM software will send your changes to the appropriate person for review and approval. That person can return the document with comments or markups if they have suggestions. When you are ready to share your document with the rest of the employees, the old policy will automatically be replaced with the new one to reduce confusion.
A compliance manager handles a lot of details every day that are very important for health and safety, especially at a healthcare facility. Managing all of these important compliance procedures to make sure policies are consistently up to date, understood, and implemented is a tough job, but help can come in the form of ECM. You’ll still be the hero that recognizes where improvements can be made and makes the changes, only now with a trusty sidekick.
For more information on enterprise content management, download our Ultimate Guide to ECM below!
