Workforce compliance is hard, and using outdated technology makes it harder — and riskier.
Healthcare is one of the most highly regulated industries in the country. It poses a perennial challenge to hospitals, health systems, and medical groups trying to keep up. Can we really depend on spreadsheets to help our healthcare systems keep track of their data? Spreadsheets remain the most common technology tool used for administering highly regulated functions like compensation and staff sourcing. For example, 97% of compensation managers use Microsoft Excel.
However, the sheer complexity of the regulations governing healthcare has long since outpaced the capabilities of such tools. Instead, modern, purpose-built technology is key to ensuring accuracy and enforcing internal and external rules. Spreadsheets fall far short of what is needed in today’s regulatory environment. Instead of saving healthcare organizations from compliance risk, spreadsheets are worsening them. Meanwhile, hospital staffing compliance solutions store an entire health system’s data in one place.
Unacceptable Risk of Error
Fully 88% of spreadsheets contain errors, largely thanks to how much manual labor it takes to wrangle them. If nothing else, the manual transfer of data from sources to spreadsheets increases the risk of inaccuracies. It also makes administering competitive, legally compliant compensation plans more challenging.
Purpose-built technology closes that gap in healthcare data security and accuracy. “A modern provider compensation management technology solution like that offered by Hallmark is going to automate data aggregation,” says Aarika Cofer, Vice President, Heisenberg II, at Hallmark. “In other words, all that data we were entering ourselves started interfacing directly into the system, cutting down manual data entry by at least 75%.”
It’s not just raw data accuracy, either; it’s the timeliness of the data too. Outdated data in healthcare IT systems causes as many problems as incorrect data. This highlights the critical need for robust healthcare data protection measures. By integrating directly with relevant data sources, modern platforms ensure that compensation-related information is up-to-date, accurate, and reflective of current regulatory standards.
Limited Ways to Enforce Policy
Internal and external rules cannot be programmatically “built into” a spreadsheet the same way they can within purpose-built technology solutions. “Spreadsheets struggle to meet—much less enforce—most organizations’ processing governance standards,” says Neeraj Isaac, co-founder and CTO of Hallmark. “A modern data processing environment should incorporate an audit mechanism that gives auditors the comfort of knowing standards are met. Excel simply can’t do that.”
Additionally, comprehensive logging and reporting provide transparency and facilitate audits, supporting organizations in demonstrating compliance efforts.
Delays and Redundancy
Time-consuming and inefficient, spreadsheets ultimately increase the “surface area” of compliance vulnerability, creating more opportunities for potential violations. Automation in healthcare compliance significantly reduces these vulnerabilities.
For instance, compliance-related data is often duplicated between multiple healthcare IT systems. This increases risks and requires massive manual labor to manage. “The routine, redundant, and remedial tasks prevalent in healthcare are overwhelming,” Darrell Bodnar, CIO of North Country HealthCare (Flagstaff, Ariz.) tells Becker’s Hospital Review. “Whether we are trying to get paid or meet a compliance directive, the volume of repetitive tasks that need completing daily is incredible. Automation of repetitive tasks is a pain point that we immediately have an impact on.”
So, if spreadsheets fall short of what’s needed, how can more modern technologies meet the compliance needs of modern HCOs?
The Compliance Landscape in Healthcare Provider Compensation
Provider compensation is a minefield of compliance risks due to federal regulations like the Stark Law. Even individually, they are challenging to manage. With medical compensation management technology, these challenges are more effectively addressed. For example, CMS has enacted nearly three dozen Stark Law exemptions, “each of which has its own set of complex rules and requirements with which providers must comply if they want protection.” And that’s just a single applicable law.
Managing that complexity requires tools that accommodate the depth and breadth of relevant regulations and all their nuances. Spreadsheets, however, make it difficult from the start. Consider simply importing data from all groups. Even if the initial data transfer was flawless, post-import manual adjustments often never get updated in Excel. For example, RVUs not tracked in the EHR are not manually tracked and keyed into Excel.
Interoperability—integrating the compensation management platform directly with other systems, like the EMR and payroll—solves this problem. If the system encounters potential exceptions in the data, it outright disallows them and/or automatically flags potential violations before they occur. This allows for proactive risk management.
The accelerating transition into value-based care models further complicates compensation-related compliance risks. A purpose-built compensation management tool, like Heisenberg II PC, can offer real-time updates, audit trails, or role-based access control. These are all critical features for maintaining compliance in a changing landscape where inadvertent errors lead to significant penalties.
The Compliance Landscape in Workforce Management
Workforce management offers no less of a labyrinth of labor laws, accreditation requirements (like tracking expired credentials), and clinical licensure standards. Systems and processes for tracking these items are, again, either manual and/or housed in a system limited to one department or function.
Worse, the data is rarely available to the frontline manager in real-time at the moment of scheduling, so decisions that fall afoul of regulatory requirements easily get made in the heat of the moment. Managing qualifications, shifts, overtime, and labor costs thus becomes an exercise in complexity that Excel spreadsheets are ill-equipped to handle. That also imposes a compliance burden unless the platform used, like Einstein II, can handle credentialing to make sure labor is both fully vetted and a good fit for staffing needs.
Here too, the purpose-built platform leverages a combination of interoperability, automation, and intelligent decision-making. By integrating staffing, onboarding, scheduling, invoicing/billing, and compliance management in a single source of truth system, the technology reduces the manual burden, minimizing the risk of human error and FTE hours among administrators.
Hospital Staffing Compliance Solutions are the Key to Compliance
In short, the risks of persisting with outdated tools are too significant to ignore, making adopting digital healthcare solutions not just a preference, but a necessity. Purpose-built technology platforms like Heisenberg II and Einstein II offer healthcare organizations the tools to manage provider compensation and the workforce effectively while rigorously meeting compliance and risk management mandates. Such platforms meet and tame the complexity of compliance in the healthcare space.
By investing in these advanced systems, the organization can be confident that every function and transaction is executed accurately with as little legal risk as possible.
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