With More Demands on Compliance, It Needs to be ‘Agile,’ Experts Say

Compliance leaders increasingly ask three questions: How can they make compliance more cost effective, be more efficient and leverage data and technology to upgrade their risk monitoring? The answers to these questions may help organizations transform their compliance programs and make them more of a strategic business partner with operations, experts say.

“If you push all three questions together, you end up with an interesting compliance continuum,” said Thomas Delegram, a managing director at Deloitte & Touche LLP. “To be more cost effective, we have to use our time more efficiently. To be more efficient, we leverage data to find where the key risks are.” In particular, the boundaries of data and automation must be pushed further to move compliance programs from reactive to proactive, Delegram said April 22 at the Health Care Compliance Association’s Compliance Institute.[1] “The days of validating things manually are in the past, and organizations should think about how to automate frontline steps so we can see compliance outcomes come through systematically rather than having to do retrospective tests.”

The stakes for modernizing compliance programs are high as compliance professionals take on a wider array of risks, said Dhara Satija, senior manager at Deloitte & Touche LLP, who also spoke at the conference. “We have seen compliance carrying the risk mantle—and not just compliance risk,” but a host of others, including third-party vendor risk, health equity, telemedicine, cybersecurity, value-based care, changes in health care policy, transparency and the response to pandemics, she said. “These are all things where if we aren’t proactive, we will spend the majority of time fighting fires.”

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