First few Article Sentences
The goal of this article is to provide ideas on how to keep your compliance program focused and effective on an organization-wide basis through the use of low-cost means. This article assumes you already have a corporate compliance program in place and are familiar with the basic requirements of a compliance plan. The focus will be on steps that your rural hospital can take to ensure it is keeping up-to-date with compliance issues and ensure that its compliance program is one that would be deemed “effective” by the federal government.
With the plethora of government audits health care providers can be subjected to today, the importance of having an effective corporate compliance program cannot be overstated. The first line of defense and best protection from all government auditors is the establishment of an effective corporate compliance program. The federal government recognizes that compliance programs must be scalable so that they fit an organization with respect to size, sophistication and available resources. While large urban hospitals can afford and are expected to have a Compliance Officer with extended staff, this is not usually the case for small rural hospitals where the entire compliance section may be one person who also has other job duties within the hospital. Rural providers typically have more limited resources than larger providers so they have to find cost-effective ways to maintain an effective compliance program.