Planning Annual Required Training – A Healthcare Compliance Case Study

To illustrate the difficulty that a typical healthcare provider may encounter when planning annual required training, we offer the example of just one role in a single state—a respiratory therapist in Tennessee. To begin, there are multiple government websites to check: CMS, OIG, eCFR, HHS, NIH, RCR, DOJ, EEOC, NRC, Homeland Security, DOT, and OSHA, plus the state board website for respiratory therapists in Tennessee, and possibly the Tennessee State Legislature website. If the organization also operates across multiple states, that adds a further degree of complexity to the situation, requiring a similar search for regulations applicable in the additional states. Add other care settings and you’ll have even more variables to track. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where important regulations are overlooked, especially when the approach to knowing them all is relatively and unavoidably piecemeal.

Finding Content to Match Requirements

Once training requirements are identified for each discipline, care setting, and state (including federal requirements), the next big challenge is finding or building appropriate content to match the requirement’s training scope and minimum seat time.

The Need for a Comprehensive Approach

The ultimate lesson here is the importance of having a comprehensive approach to identifying all training requirements for healthcare staff and properly assigning them, so that nothing falls through the cracks and causes a problem later during an audit or investigation. Finding the regulations isn’t easy, when a healthcare organization must search several sections of the federal register, other agency websites, and any state-level sources that are applicable. Building, licensing, and properly assigning the content is yet another challenge.

Suggested Questions During Planning

Some questions to consider during this stage include:

• Are there multiple regulations that overlap in the requirements?
• Is there a single course or limited set of courses that will satisfy multiple requirements? And likewise for multiple disciplines?
• Are all the courses that I’m currently assigning still relevant and required? Have the laws changed since we first added them to our annual curricula?
• Do we have in-house subject matter expertise and bandwidth to build this content and maintain it as regulations change? And what is the total cost to build the content internally compared to licensing it?

This blog post excerpts the HealthStream article, The Challenge of Translating Healthcare Regulations into Training Curricula, by Ben Diamond, Vice President of Compliance Solutions, and Debbie Newsholme, Senior Director of Content Develop­ment and Compliance Solutions, at HCCS, A HealthStream Company. The article also includes:

• Statistics about the Current Monetary and Labor Burden for Healthcare Compliance
• The Impact of Compliance on Healthcare Staff
• Compliance Concerns for Specific Continuum Environments
• The Planning Process for Annual Healthcare Training