The healthcare industry is one of the most regulated industries to exist due to its highly sensitive work environment. Since lives are at stake every day in the healthcare field, healthcare employers should consider implementing a continuous monitoring program to ensure that patient safety and care remain top of mind.
Implementing a continuous monitoring solution can help maximize safety and risk mitigation, provide real-time alerts on changes in employment qualifications of your workforce, and help protect your organization from potential liabilities.
What is continuous monitoring and why does it matter for healthcare organizations?
Some employers conduct regular rescreens on current employees to uncover criminal offenses or other causes for concern.
Rescreening alerts your team to red flags they wouldn’t have seen otherwise. But typically they’re only conducted annually or semi-annually, so they may not catch potential issues quickly enough for your team to respond in time.
For example, your top nurse “passes” their annual rescreen in May, gets convicted of assault in June, and then assaults a patient in September, months before the next yearly rescreen would’ve alerted you to her documented violent behavior. In this case, that lag time would expose your organization up to negligent retention claims, financial damages, and serious reputational risk.
Continuous monitoring helps organizations avoid that situation by constantly monitoring your roster for potential red flags, including criminal offenses, expired licenses, sanctions and other causes for concern as customized by your organization.
Most background screening providers will alert you to these concerns in almost real-time, so your organization can identify and respond to potential issues more quickly.
Continuous monitoring can help employers stay informed and help prevent fines, penalties, lawsuits, and more. Other benefits of continuous monitoring for healthcare organizations include:
The biggest benefits of continuous monitoring for healthcare organizations
- Monitor risk in (almost) real time: Continuous monitoring flags new criminal activity, license sanctions, or exclusions as they occur — so you can learn about serious concerns nearly as soon as they happen.
- Keep your patients safe: Keeping tabs on employees’ legal and professional standing helps ensure only qualified, trustworthy individuals are delivering care.
- Regulatory compliance support: Continuous monitoring helps meet federal and state requirements, including those from CMS, OIG, and state licensing boards, without relying on periodic checks alone.
- Reduce your legal and financial risk: Identifying and addressing issues early can help healthcare organizations avoid lawsuits, fines, and reputational damage tied to negligent hiring or retention.
- Streamline recredentialing: Ongoing license verification and monitoring reduce the workload and errors associated with manual recredentialing processes.
- Relieve administrative bottlenecks: Automated alerts eliminate the need for staff to chase down background or license updates, so your HR and compliance teams can focus on higher-value tasks.
- Improve accountability: Knowing that credentials and records are being monitored encourages employees to maintain compliance and uphold professional standards.
- Respond more quickly to compliance issues: When something changes, like a license suspension or new arrest, organizations can take immediate steps to protect patients and operations.
- Improve record-keeping and prepare for audits: Continuous tracking creates a clear, up-to-date audit trail that makes it easier to respond to internal reviews or external audits.
- Make better hiring and retention decisions: Insights from continuous monitoring can help identify employees who may pose a long-term risk or require additional support, enabling more informed workforce management.
What to look for in a continuous monitoring solution
- Industry-leading turnaround times and accuracy rates: Prioritize vendors with reliable performance and 99.9% accuracy rates, so you can trust each result that comes in. The best providers will use live connections with both court and arrest sources to expand coverage and reduce the time from event to reporting.
- Easily accessible alerts via email and SMS: You don’t want serious news getting buried in your inbox. Make sure your background screening provider can send alerts via email and SMS.
- Customizable alerts: Not every role requires the same level of scrutiny. And a flood of irrelevant alerts makes it more difficult to find and prioritize the ones that require immediate response. So look for a background screening provider that’ll let you filter alerts based on each role or location (for example, screening support staff for criminal offenses only, but checking license and sanctions violations, sex offender and abuse registries, etc. for providers).
- Mobile-first technology: Your technology can make or break your screening experience. Choose a tool with mobile-first technology so your candidates and current employees can submit and sign documents no matter where they are or when they’re working.
- Dedicated industry experience: Look for background screening providers with a proven record of success with other healthcare organizations, and who can connect you with a team of healthcare screening experts.
- Global 24/7/363 client and employee support manned by live human experts: Employment decisions are highly sensitive, especially when they involve employees already at your company. Make sure you’re using a tool that’ll help you wherever and whenever you need it most.
- Global compliance support: Look for providers with a compliance team that can educate you on healthcare-specific screening regulations and update you on new legislation.
Contact our team or click the link to learn more about our continuous monitoring solutions today.
