Compliance is a significant concern within healthcare, adhering to government and insurance requirements. For hospice, where employee turnover is at the highest level in years, ensuring continuity of care and compliance provides a challenge for organizations across the country. Finding ways to maintain compliance means exploring new tools and processes.
Risk of Employee Turnover
The more a process depends on the memory of individuals and intervention or manual activity, the greater the risk posed by employee turnover. In most industries, this may be an inconvenience. In healthcare, these issues risk certification and, more importantly, the well-being of patients.
Mitigating Turnover Risk
Identifying vulnerabilities related to turnover is critical among the many responsibilities of Certified Medical Compliance Officers (CMCO). Relying on spreadsheets, notes, paper forms (or PDF equivalent), and email poses multiple risks for the admissions process. Employing digital transformation to the admissions process helps maintain compliance while also easing the burden on the team when there is employee turnover.
Reducing the complexity of processes minimizes the risk posed to compliance.
Digital Transformation in Patient Admissions
SMARTMD developed the Virtual Intake Portal, or VIP, working with hospice administrators to simplify the digital transition for patient admission.
VIP goes well beyond e-signatures on PDFs. The platform implements the required forms electronically, specifically designed for use on electronic devices, and captures authorized signatures.
Additionally, the patients upload documents via cell phone (with auto orientation correction.) As a patient provides documents and forms, the system records the progress, allowing admissions teams to monitor and manage the process.
Because the process is digital and each patient’s status is always visible to administrators, employee turnover does not risk continuity or information.
Digital transformation for admissions reduces compliance risk while onboarding new employees, reduces the time to admit patients, and provides administrators with a single source for information and status.
The Process of Digital Transformation
Finding the resources for digital transformation poses one of the more significant challenges for organizations. Work with partners that have helped other organizations manage the process to facilitate change.
Incorporating the lessons of past experiences and applying the latest evolution of ideas and tools allows hospice organizations to implement digital transformation faster and with fewer bumps.