Developing Impactful Compliance Training Solutions
Corporate compliance training has somewhat of an infamous reputation. Much of the business world regards it as boring, at best, and counterintuitive [1], at worst [2]. It’s certainly true that without a clear direction and the implementation of best practices, compliance training can be little more than a waste of budget. However, its reputation doesn’t stop it from being a necessary step to prevent risk and protect business interests, especially in certain industries.
The healthcare industry is one of these. With patients’ lives on the line, proper compliance protects their health and safety while also shielding clinicians from potential lawsuits. Ensuring that proper procedures are followed to ensure patient safety is critical for everyone involved.
With such high stakes, the relatively low success rate [3] for corporate compliance training becomes a little worrisome. The programs developed for the healthcare industry – for doctors, nurses, and other clinicians especially – must be both engaging and effective to make an impact and improve patient safety.
To better understand what can be done to achieve this outcome, let’s take a closer look at a real case study where AllenComm developed a solution for a clinician group seeking to increase compliance with medical charting regulations.
The Need
Our client has focused mainly on clinical documentation, helping clinicians improve the quality of their work in portraying accurately the condition of the patients being treated. More precise documentation has many benefits, as it helps improve the accuracy of reimbursement, the quality ratings, the patient status determination, and the performance under the programs these clinicians work. While the client currently had an engagement strategy that had many strengths, they needed a solution to promote better compliance consistently and accurately.
The client needed an approach that could successfully and consistently convey these standards while also covering the gaps that their previous solutions had left open. The training needed to be more scalable, to be applied flexibly to address staff turnover limitations, and to provide a comprehensive understanding of documentation standards across the board. On top of this, the program would need to be engaging enough for busy clinicians to feel that it was worth their time. Allencomm was a great fit for their needs because of our experience with compliance and healthcare, and with developing content that could then be customized to suit a variety of different groups.
The Solution
To meet the need, Allencomm would transition the client’s current training strategy to a web-based plan. Here’s what we did:
- Because of the day-to-day demands that clinicians face, we created a program allowing for on-demand learning, available wherever and whenever its learners had the time. Our strategy involved sequenced skill-building and utilized assessments to help clinicians gauge their understanding of the material.
- To elevate the content, we created several custom infographics, which highlighted the material. We also provided video demos and problem-solving scenarios to allow clinicians to absorb and practice, using the information they were presented with.
- Our delivery was optimized through the use of a learning portal which integrated personalized learning paths. Through progress tracking, clinicians could easily determine where they were in the course, and what they needed to do to complete it.
The Takeaways
This solution was successful because it was developed specifically to meet the needs of its audience. Due to the complexity of the content and the time restraints that clinicians face, an off-the-shelf training program would have likely missed the mark. By developing a custom corporate compliance training solution, the program could be tailored not only to the client but to the client’s clients as well – the clinicians who would ultimately be taking the training.
Furthermore, by leveraging best practices, Allencomm was able to develop training that resonated with its learners. Because we believe in training that can be incorporated into an employee’s workload with as little friction as possible, we made sure to structure the content to be easily digestible for learning on the go. We developed a solution based on our understanding of a clinician’s day-to-day life and priorities, for an outcome that promoted compliance and could serve as a reference tool going forward.
Compliance training shouldn’t have to be dreaded, even as a necessary evil, especially in industries where patients’ health is on the line. With the right insight and the right fit, it doesn’t have to be. The first step is finding a development partner who is willing to do the research to understand what the learners really need and how to present that information based on researched best practices.
Have you ever come across a need similar to the client’s in the case study? How are you taking steps to invest in impactful compliance training?
References:
- 'Criminalized' compliance may backfire in quest for better Wall Street cultures
- The Pernicious Problems of Diversity Training
- Why Compliance Programs Fail—and How to Fix Them
