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3 Ways Contract Management Can Improve Healthcare Compliance121
The best practices in team collaboration to create healthcare policies and procedures requires a multi-disciplinary team of experts, including key clinical leaders, department heads, and administrators. As you can imagine, it can be difficult to get these very busy individuals in a room together to discuss policies. In the recent past, the creation of policies, and the discussion surrounding the process has mainly taken place via email. Using email, however, comes with its own set of challenges. At PolicyMedical, we are well aware of the challenges that come with team collaboration on policies and procedures, and we have developed key best practices to help you work more efficiently.
Best Practices in Team Collaboration to Create Policies
There has been a dramatic rise in the use of electronic records and email in healthcare. Thus, when meeting physically to discuss policies and procedures was not possible, email was the next best thing. The policy was sent back and forth among policy writers, reviewers, and approvers, over days or weeks. If an attachment was forgotten, the policy got buried in an inbox, or participants lost track of the most updated version, which led to a major breakdown in the process.
‘Projects’ is a feature of PolicyManager that was created to prevent this breakdown. Within our software, a Project is an automated workflow for policy creation. To use this feature, first, you select a group of individuals who will be on your policy committee. Within this committee, you can select authors, reviewers, and approvers. Once you have selected who will fill each role, you can specify dates for each task to be completed. The system will notify each individual on your policy committee by email when it’s time for them to complete their task. If an individual is late on completing their task, or if they are unavailable, committee members are notified so that they can adjust accordingly.
Getting a policy approved is not the final step in the policy creation process. Once policies are approved, they must be published and made accessible in a central repository. Previously, hospitals used a network drive to house policies in a series of folders, usually organized by department. This method lacks sufficient search functionality and makes finding policies a tedious process. PolicyMedical’s PolicyManager solution solves this problem. Once policies are written, reviewed, and approved through Projects, they are published in our cloud-based environment. PolicyManager has robust search capabilities that allow users to search by department, keyword, policy title, policy number, or body text of the policy. Results can then be filtered or sorted to refine the search.
Streamlining Your Policy Creation Process
In today’s healthcare environment, hospital mergers are becoming more and more frequent, and multi-site hospital networks are the norm. This environment requires a streamlined approach to policy creation that brings together your team of policy experts. It also requires a centralized, well-organized, and searchable repository of published policies. Here at PolicyMedical, we understand that the policy creation process can be quite challenging. If you would like to find out how best practices will help your team work more efficiently contact us to find out more. It will help take the pain out of team collaboration on policies and procedures. Alternatively, if you would like to see PolicyMedical’s Policy Manager software in action please request a demo.
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