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Healthcare organizations are charged with assessing the competency of clinical staff. So, compliance officers must figure out how to measure the real-world clinical performance of many very different roles in a complex, fast-changing, highly-regulated environment.
It’s as hard as it sounds.
But competency assessments are one of the best ways to control risk and maintain patient safety, so it’s worth it. In this article, I’ll help you turn competency assessments from a rushed administrative task to a meaningful evaluation. I’ll share how competency assessments can reduce risk, outline best practices for complete competency assessments, and explain why healthcare organizations are relying on software to make the entire competency assessment process better, faster, and easier.
Mastering Measurable Competency Assessments: Protecting Patients and Reducing Risk
How Competency Assessments Can Reduce Risk
Designed to protect both patients and staff, competency assessments are formal evaluations of the clinical staff’s ability to complete their job duties following proper, safe procedures specific to their role.
In practice, there are two common parts of assessing healthcare staff competence:
- Skills Assessment: Typically the staff member completes a check-the-box self-evaluation of their current skill level, based on the role they are performing.
- Competency Assessment: A supervisor, or preceptor, evaluates the staff member’s ability to complete the same skills listed in the self evaluation. This can take many different forms, based on the role and healthcare organization. Performance can be assessed through direct observation, a written test, a simulation, or a record review.
These assessments identify areas where the employee is unable to perform a task or lacks confidence and may need additional practice. Using the assessments together, you can see gaps where employees say they can perform a skill, but are unable to do it correctly or follow the organization’s procedure. Armed with these results, you have a clear map to proactively reduce risk and protect patients.
Any areas where the clinician doesn’t pass with the highest possible score are opportunities for additional training and development, with a plan to retest in 30 or 60 days. This is the best way to reduce the risk of workplace incidents, injury, and even harm to patients from staff who are not able to properly complete their responsibilities.
Competency reviews also provide protection for healthcare organizations by creating documented proof that a staff member’s competency was assessed and follow-up completed, which helps protect your organization in legal action, an audit, or investigation. Some of the top accreditation findings are caused by employees in clinical roles who are not completing tasks at a high level. For example, verifying informed consent prior to procedures and the ability to demonstrate correct procedures for medication administration.
Conducting Competency Assessments That Reduce Risk
With so many varied roles at large, non-specialized healthcare facilities like community health centers or hospitals, it’s difficult to develop competency assessments that are adequately role-specific while maintaining some level of standardization. That’s why many organizations are turning to healthcare compliance software to improve the competency assessment process by minimizing both the disruption of care services and manual administrative work.
Here are three steps to conduct competency assessments that reduce risk.
1. Carefully design the assessment process.
Strong assessment preparation and delivery leads to well prepared employees and less risk for your organization. It’s worth the investment to get it right!
When creating your assessments, make sure you have versions that are specific to each role and care setting within your organization. Craft questions that are objective, measurable, and demonstrate knowledge. For example, you should already have the employee’s BLS completion certificate — asking about BLS skills doesn’t need to be part of the assessment. If you’re using a healthcare compliance platform, like MedTrainer, assessments are already created by experts and loaded into the template library — ready to use.
Using a combined form, with both a skills assessment and competency assessment together, supervisors have the opportunity to quickly identify gaps between the two assessments, and keep related documentation together for audit readiness. Completing multi-dimensional assessments like this accounts for the inherent nuance in the vague definitions of “competency,” offers assurance staff are fully prepared, and gives you an opportunity to eliminate skills deficiencies before they become a problem.
Making the skills self-assessments easily accessible in a document management platform simplifies the process for employees, and makes access, storage, and audit-ready reporting faster and easier.
2. Align the assessments with job requirements.
A one-size-fits-all competency assessment is not effective at reducing your organization’s risk or protecting patient safety. Assessments should be tailored to the specific role responsibilities of the staff member, as well as to your care setting and accrediting organization. For example, the care setting and role responsibilities of a pre-operative nurse practicing in an ambulatory surgery center are very different from those of a home health nurse. Competencies should also be updated when new equipment is introduced, procedures change, and guidelines shift.
In healthcare organizations with many different clinical roles and/or care settings, the volume of distinct assessments can be overwhelming. That’s why organizations use software that includes expert-drafted assessment templates. You can trust you’re getting an assessment that is thorough, tailored to the specific requirements of the role, and aligned with regulatory standards for compliance peace-of-mind. Plus, when the assessment process is completed in one online platform, it’s easy to find the right form and maintain consistency.
3. Incorporate competency reviews in your existing compliance process.
Including competency assessments as part of your compliance workflow is a sure-fire way to make sure they’re completed in a timely manner and can be immediately used to improve staff skills. Compliance software makes this much easier.
Assign the skills assessment as part of new hire onboarding, along with initial compliance training, policies to review, and HR forms. When it’s all in the same platform with automated reminders, employees complete it faster and supervisors can do their competency assessment in the same place. This way, you can keep documentation stored digitally for easy, searchable access, and you can assign any required training or policy review that stems from the assessment within the same platform. If additional training or policy reviews are needed, these can also be assigned and tracked for a complete audit trail. Existing employees are already used to completing training and incident reports in the platform, so they’re already familiar when it’s time to complete periodic skills assessments.
Why Complete Competency Assessments in MedTrainer
MedTrainer’s all-in-one healthcare compliance platform is the ideal software for competency assessments. Connecting credentialing, compliance, and learning in one place, MedTrainer enables thorough competency assessments based on role, care setting, and accreditation requirements without any unnecessary hurdles for staff or admins.
MedTrainer offers competency assessment templates for all roles in these care settings and to meet these accreditation requirements:
- Ambulatory Surgery Centers: CMS, AAAHC, Quad A, TJC
- Home Health: CARF, TJC
- Federally-Qualified Health Centers: HRSA, CMS, AAAHC
- Behavioral health: TJC, CARF
Using these expert-drafted templates, you can immediately start conducting thorough competency assessments without taking time to develop your own. Plus, integrated into a comprehensive compliance workflow, it’s easy to complete and track progress, and assign follow-up action based on competency assessment results. With MedTrainer, there’s no need to buy and learn multiple tools—everything you need is right in one place.
Competency assessments are too important to leave to chance, manual processes, or vague definitions of what “competent” actually means. When designed thoughtfully and conducted consistently, they protect your patients, shield your organization from compliance risks, and give your staff a clear path to growth. But building and managing that process across every role, care setting, and accreditation requirement is no small task. MedTrainer makes it manageable by bringing competency assessments, compliance workflows, and learning into one connected platform so nothing falls through the cracks.
Ready to move beyond disconnected tools and build a competency assessment process that truly reduces risk? Schedule a demo today to see MedTrainer in action.