Building and Measuring a Culture of Compliance

An organization’s compliance program should set the tone and standards expected in a healthcare work place, especially in terms of corporate and employee integrity. The compliance culture directly influences an organization’s commitment to compliance and avoidance of liabilities arising from a failure to meet compliance standards. Most healthcare organizations have invested significant effort towards implementing a compliance program. However, many are unable to evidence an improved compliance culture and a reduction in exposure to regulatory and legal liabilities. Therefore, being able to measure the compliance culture in an organization and benchmark improvements over time is critical.

Efforts to measure compliance culture are a top priority for many leaders and members of healthcare organizations but doing so often proves to be very daunting. Measuring compliance culture can be very overwhelming because of the lack of effective ways to measure compliance and use compliance measurement tools. However, Daniel Peake, of the Compliance Resource Center, explains that the best way to gather the required data is to conduct a Compliance Culture Survey of employees.

The Compliance Culture Survey can capture relevant details surrounding the compliance program with questions that gauge employee attitudes and perceptions regarding the existing compliance culture. However, to be truly useful, the Culture Survey should be professionally developed, tested, validated and independently administered. Furthermore, if the Survey is stored in a large database, it can permit benchmarking of an organization’s compliance culture against all other organizations that used the same Survey. The results of both the Survey and benchmarking can provide a great amount of useful information for compliance officers in identifying areas of strength, as well as those warranting attention. Ideally, a Culture Survey will offer specific targeted action steps based on the results to improve overall scores. The same Survey taken in a subsequent period can measure changes resulting from actions taken.

Compliance Resource Center, sister company to Strategic Management, provides comprehensive, professional Survey services that can help you evidence your workforce’s knowledge and perceptions of the compliance program. For more information on our Survey services, or specific questions on our Compliance Culture Survey, contact Daniel Peake at [email protected] or (703-236-9854).

About the Author

Richard P. Kusserow established Strategic Management Services, LLC, after retiring from being the DHHS Inspector General, and has assisted over 3,000 health care organizations and entities in developing, implementing and assessing compliance programs.