NASHVILLE – On Thursday, November 19, Guidant Partners, a full-service IT planning and management company, hosted 50 members of Nashville’s healthcare industry for a Lunch and Learn titled, “Tension: Bridging Compliance and the Bottom Line.” Held in partnership with SVMIC and Richards & Richards Office Records Management, the Lunch and Learn addressed the tension between compliance and profit within today’s healthcare organizations and how to shape the two for success.
“When compliance and the bottom line are opposing forces, balance only comes from design. You need a plan,” said Loretta Duncan, senior medical practice consultant at SVMIC. “Noncompliance costs much more than getting compliant, so it’s better to spend the money on the frontend to ensure compliance.”
Five takeaways from the Lunch and Learn include:
- The focus of HIPAA security is to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of all electronic protected health information. To do so, HIPAA compliance includes strict standards, mandating data back-up, a disaster recovery plan and emergency mode operations among other implementation specifications.
- The two biggest risks to data are lack of availability and data breaches. In fact, in 2015 there have been 620 reported data breaches. Of those, 221, or 35.6 percent, are healthcare breaches. To help prevent breaches, employ a multilayered cybersecurity defenseand have a disaster plan in place if a breach should occur.
- Data management is critical to ensure compliance, protect against financial consequences and mitigate the risk to productivity. When developing a data plan, it should include a data management and retention policy that covers from inception to deletion.
- Digital data is growing faster than paper records ever did. It’s costly to manage all of that data, so just like managing paper records, decide when certain data is no longer “active” and move to a less expensive archive media type.
- Today, data is critical to healthcare organizations, so by protecting data, healthcare organizations are protecting their business. It is helpful to view compliance as an investment in maintaining and even increasing the bottom line.
Guidant Partners’ Lunch and Learn series is designed to educate businesses with real, actionable takeaways guided by the company’s proven processes, industry expertise and track record of success. The November Lunch and Learn was the final event for 2015. The series will resume in 2016.