Navigating Policy Challenges in Healthcare: Centralized Management for Compliance and Efficiency

26 Jul

Navigating Policy Challenges in Healthcare: Centralized Management for Compliance and Efficiency

Centralized management of healthcare policies solves compliance and efficiency problems for healthcare organization policymakers and employees.

Hospitals and other organizations are responsible for creating and maintaining policies for patient safety and delivering quality care. Nurses and other healthcare employees must access, read, and follow healthcare policies when caring for patients. This process sounds straightforward until you consider the financial cost of policy creation, maintenance, and the non-compliance of staff when policies are hard to access and read.

Is it possible that a centralized policy management system can provide a solution?

The Purpose of Healthcare Policies

Healthcare policies are like the steel supports of a building, silently maintaining the safety of the occupants. They often go unnoticed until needed. Healthcare policies

Outline safe and effective care delivery
Prevent errors by providing protocols of procedures, medication delivery, and primary care
Protect healthcare workers in an adverse event
Provide care standards to meet accreditation
Give direction for emergencies

The Pain Points of Compliance and Efficiency

The administration that oversees policy management and frontline employees who utilize these policies would benefit from a centralized policy management system. They both deal with issues of compliance and efficiency in different ways.

To comply means to adhere to orders, rules, and regulations. To be efficient is to expend a minimum of waste, exertion, or expense. MCN Policy Management Solutions can provide the solution for both.

Managers and policymakers

Managers and policymakers must create policies that comply with federal health regulations and meet the criteria for accreditation as determined by the organization’s accrediting organization. Policies must be reviewed and revised with new federal and state laws and updated per regulation or standard. Employees need to be notified of all policy changes. In addition, staff must sometimes wait days or weeks to have policies signed off by required stakeholders.

Policy management requires many hours of work by experienced healthcare professionals. Policy creation and management workload are often hidden within a larger budget, and the extent of inefficiency and expenditures is seldom known.

Nursing and other healthcare employees

Nurses and other healthcare workers depend on these policies, along with the computer software of hospitals and healthcare organizations. As part of their job, nurses must comply with healthcare policies to keep their patients and themselves safe and deliver quality care.

However, current staffing shortages and information technology (IT) inefficiency reduce compliance when nurses find it challenging to access policies. Often, managers and administrators who have been away from the bedside for quite a while are the ones who write policies. Many healthcare policies include titles and keywords that don’t reflect current nursing vocabulary and make it difficult for nurses to find them. As a result, many nurses become frustrated and non-compliant.

Do the factors of non-compliance and inefficiency echo your experience?

What Does MCN Healthcare Solutions Have to Offer You?

Two trauma nurses who recognized the fundamental need for a better way to manage hospital policies designed MCN Healthcare Policy Management Solutions. MCN Healthcare takes the pain out of policy management. Instead of outdated policy binders kept in nursing stations or unwieldy IT systems that make finding policies a burden, you can have updated, easy-to-find policies at your fingertips. Schedule a demo before you go any further!

MCN’s Policy Management Solutions is a cloud-based software delivery model that lets you access your policies from a central location on the Internet. Another term is SaaS, which means Software-as-a-Service.

Here are some of the services offered:

MCN Policy Manager. MCN’s policy manager gives you access to your organization’s policies and tracks employee compliance.
Policy Library. When you sign a contract for MCN Policy Management Software and Library, you get access to professionally written policy manuals and policy and procedure templates in the policy library that you can customize for your facility.
StayAlert! When regulations or standards change, your company will receive a StayAlert! email about the changes so that you can advise your staff.
StayAlert! Plus. StayAlert! Plus takes policy change notifications a step further and matches the alerts with policies residing in your policy manager that may need further action.
Contract Manager. Does your organization need a management process for contracts accompanied by an audit trail? This contract manager is a good option for you.
Web-Based Learning. MCN Healthcare’s learning management system and e-learning modules make teaching easy. Track your employees learning needs and testing with both clinical and non-clinical courses.

What Does Life Look Like After You Sign a Contract With MCN?

As the site administrator, how would you feel if you came to work after a weekend off to your phone blinking and a full inbox? On Saturday, a patient incurred an injury from a fall. The weekend supervisor left you a message saying that protocols were not followed and licensing needs to be informed. The nurse involved has been working at the facility for five years, could not access the organization’s policy on restraints, and is at fault.

When you open your agenda, you see that you are scheduled to attend a morning of policy reviews in compliance with the upcoming accreditation. In addition, you need to finish the budget, do a walkabout with the CEO, and follow up on a board member’s questions.

Now, fast forward to the weekend after signing a contract with MCN Healthcare. When you walk in on Monday morning, you first check your phone, email, and agenda. You have no policy management items booked, and there were no policy-related incidents over the weekend. Your budget meeting with the CEO affirms that the money for the MCN contract is efficient and encourages compliance for you and your employees.

Are you feeling overwhelmed at work, and policy management is just one more thing on your agenda? Book a demo with MCN Healthcare Policy Management Solutions and speak with a representative about your company’s needs.