Outsourcing: The Compliance Solution You Never Knew You Needed
Compliance departments are often overloaded with responsibilities and obligations, making it difficult to quickly and efficiently address compliance risks and maintain an effective program from inside the organization. Yet hiring additional staff to help cover the workload has its own challenges including budgeting, timing, and trouble identifying talent. Additionally, the ever-changing nature of the regulatory environment forces organizations to regularly update internal policies and re-train staff on the compliance program, risk areas, and compliance areas specific to their job duties.
While these are standard tasks of any compliance department, many departments do not have the appropriate resources or staff able to meet required standards of federal and state laws and the expectations of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG). In fact, the 2018 Healthcare Compliance Benchmark Survey conducted by Strategic Management Services and SAI Global revealed that 75% of surveyed healthcare organizations have five or fewer staff members in their compliance department. This overall lack of critical compliance support can quickly snowball, potentially leading to non-compliant operations and government intervention.
In light of these challenges, many organizations are using outside experts to help develop and manage the compliance program in collaboration with their current compliance staff. These experts can provide both complete support for the entire compliance program and partial support, focusing on specific areas of the program that need the most improvement. This approach provides fundamental and high-quality support with the added benefit of working with and learning from a highly trained compliance expert…
