By Ken Reiher, VP Operations, ComplyAssistant
Twitter: @ComplyAssistant
Why You Should Replace Your Pen And Paper With A Mobile Application
It’s funny how the definition of the old-fashioned way changes over time. With innovation and advances in technology, we get faster, easier and more accurate. Who knew that one day, we’d be calling flip phones or desktop computers old-fashioned?
If you’re still doing HIPAA audits the old-fashioned way with pen and paper, you’re missing out on valuable time savings, and you could be making critical errors in the back-end reporting of healthcare compliance audit information.
With smartphones and the age of mobile applications, there’s a much faster and more accurate way to gather and report your compliance data.
Here we have five reasons to make the jump from old-fashioned to mobile when performing healthcare compliance audits:
- Standardization comes standard. Healthcare organizations often have multiple auditors on staff, each sent out to a different facility every week to perform healthcare compliance audits. With a mobile audit process, each auditor’s process is standardized based on how your organization wants to gather information. Because your audit criteria is predefined in a mobile app, you have a more consistent reporting approach across your team. Standardization is also a foundational component to measuring and understanding trends, analyzing risk, determining where risks are and training for mitigation.
- Reduce margin of error. How many times have you returned to the office and discovered you were unable to read your handwriting from a healthcare compliance audit? Or you couldn’t remember what a note meant? In some cases, there’s one person compiling reports for a team of auditors. What happens if that person doesn’t understand or misses notes? The margin of error is simply higher when performing these audits manually. The risk of missing something in your report could range from physical safety hazards to HIPAA breaches. By documenting audit notes on the fly in a mobile app, you avoid potential risk of those notes getting lost in translation.
- Save time and resources. Could you imagine saving 50 to 75 percent of your time spent performing healthcare compliance audits? While that’s an estimate and varies by organization, the time it takes to perform a walkthrough—documenting vulnerabilities and performing random workforce competency interviews—PLUS the time to write up a report could be five hours or more. Walkthrough = approximately 2 hours + Report write-up = approximately 3 hours = 5 hours With mobile audits, the time you spend writing reports is eliminated. In the example above, that’s three extra hours per audit back in your day. Now multiply that by the number of auditors on your team and you’ve got significant time savings.
- Allow for volume and scale. Healthcare compliance audits are already tedious and labor intensive. Auditing with pen and paper adds more steps and time to the already lengthy process when you have to manually write up reports after a walkthrough. By using a mobile application to digitally gather audit information during a walkthrough, you no longer need to worry about compiling reports later. All your walkthrough data is stored automatically. The time saved allows your audit staff to manage more volume. In this age of mergers and acquisitions, every minute saved helps!
- Make task management easier. Trying to manage a to-do list that’s written out on 50 pieces of paper? How do you keep up with it all? By documenting any healthcare compliance audit exceptions directly in a mobile app, you immediately have access to that information, along with action items and assignments. With this level of visibility and organization, you can easily see and track what needs to be done—and keep your team accountable for those action items. More accountability means less vulnerability.
Ready to bring your healthcare compliance audits into the digital age?
This article was originally published on ComplyAssistant and is republished here with permission.