Healthcare policy management is just as important as the policies themselves. If you’re still filing paper policies in filing cabinets or binders, it’s time to modernize your approach. Electronic medical records started the push for digitizing healthcare practices, and digital compliance is now the key to your organization’s safety and success.

When you have a secure, compliant digital policy management system, you’ll create a culture of accountability, mitigate risk, and ensure your practice is legally compliant and protected. Here’s why your practice should care about healthcare policy management.

Risk Mitigation

One obvious reason to prioritize policy management is risk mitigation. In the healthcare industry, there are a number of legal and safety risks. As the world of health care policy evolves, there can be a lot of new standards and best practices to embrace. It’s much easier to update your policies when they’re in an accessible, searchable online system with automatic reminders as policies are about to expire.

Although you’ll never remove all of the risk, you can minimize your exposure by setting clear expectations, highlighting accountability, and providing your staff the tools needed to understand and comply with your policies at all times.

Legal Compliance

Ensuring legal compliance helps protect you from lawsuits and expensive legal fees, and can potentially even lower your insurance premiums. Managing your policies closely and keeping them current helps maintain strict compliance.

One of the most effective ways to manage your legal policy documents is by using an electronic platform. Electronic policy management can be one of the most effective ways to control compliance and make sure your policies align with the most recent laws from all governing bodies.

Avoid Fines and Reimbursement Issues

Your healthcare policies act as a guide to procedures and standards within the organization, but they can also protect you from incurring hefty fines or encountering reimbursement issues. By digitizing your healthcare policies and automating management tasks, you’re less likely to run afoul of the myriad standards with which your organization must comply. In turn, you’ll be better able to manage the practice’s cash flow and won’t be surprised by fines, or problems with getting reimbursed from private insurance or programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Build a Culture of Safety

Part of healthcare policy management is documenting that your staff has been trained on all policies — and they’re keeping up with their required training. Ensuring that all staff members have access to and understand the organization’s policies helps them stay on top of their employment-related obligations.

This creates a culture of safety, which is critical to fostering a safe, comfortable, and compliant staff environment. Digitizing your healthcare policies and procedures allows the staff to easily access training materials, job aides, and other guidelines. As a result, you can set strict expectations for full policy compliance.

Ensure Quality of Patient Care

As a healthcare provider, providing high quality patient care should be your top priority. Creating a digital healthcare policy management system and database helps guarantee that all of your staff receive standardized training, and are aware of and following your standardized procedures. Your patients will receive the same high-quality care each time they engage with an employee, whether they’re receiving medical care, filling out paperwork, or receiving discharge instructions.

Stay Current with Technology

Upgrading your technological services can help you increase efficiency within your practice — but it can also be daunting to implement a new system and train everyone. Because there is such a push to digitize patient and organizational records, however, it’s important to stay current with modern technology and industry standards.

Watch this video for a closer look at MedTrainer’s Document and Policy Management feature.

Having all your manuals and documents in a central online location helps in several ways. Not only do you save on printing costs, it’s also more efficient to edit and update policies. Best of all, digitizing policy management allows you to easily track training and hold staff members accountable. When it’s all in one system, like MedTrainer, you can simply log in and monitor progress, update policies as needed and ensure compliance, all in one place.

Improve Your Practice with Online Healthcare Policy Management

With policy management software, you can automate your training efforts. From creating customized curricula to updating them with new information based on employee outcomes, cloud-based document management makes your everyday processes easier.

6 Tips for Improving Your Policy Management

1. Conduct a policy review and audit. Take a close look at your policies to make sure all policies comply with local, state, federal, and governing body regulations. If they don’t, or if you aren’t quite sure, consult with an expert in compliance training.
2. Set a policy structure that is standard, simple, and matches the standards of your accrediting or licensing organization. All policies will be different, but give them all a similar structure, look, and feel, and you’ll get better results.
3. Standardize your file names and include the creation date, standard number, and a clear policy name so that when people search or filter, policies are easy to find.
4. Automate as much as possible. Use an escalation matrix for policy approvals and use automatic reminders for employee acknowledgements.
5. Don’t stop at policies. Keeping safety plans, safety data sheets, manufacturer instructions, and even contracts all together in a digital binder ensures that employees have access to everything they need in any situation.
6. Use electronic signatures to make it easy for employees to sign off on the policies and your practice can keep track of the acknowledgements in case of an audit.

Leverage the Power of MedTrainer for Policy Management

Whether you have stacks of paper manuals or you’re actively using a healthcare policy management system, you’ll always need a secure, efficient, and streamlined software platform. Invest in your staff with a solid healthcare policy management system: it not only benefits your employees but will keep you and your practice protected.

For more information about how MedTrainer can simplify your policy management processes, schedule a product demo today.