Through conversations with many of our customers, we have heard about the burdens compliance teams face as they try to do more with less. Hospitals nationwide are facing extraordinary challenges to their operating stability as they respond to COVID-19 in their communities; some staff are working longer hours to keep up with demands of patient care; in other cases, staff have been furloughed due to budget cuts and decreased patient admissions. 

The Ohio Health Information Partnership (OHIP) launched in 2009 with a handful of physician offices; its health information exchange (HIE) is called CliniSync. Today, it covers nearly 90% of the state of Ohio and is one of the largest programs in the country. It includes 155 hospitals; more than 500 long-term and post-acute care facilities; 15,000 independent and hospital-employed physicians; and 60 connected EHRs. More than 16 million patients are now represented in CliniSync’s community master patient index. 

Like hospital systems nationwide, Indiana University Health (IU Health), faces the challenge of better detecting the theft of controlled substances occurring within its organization, a problem usually referred to as drug diversion. As the largest and most comprehensive healthcare system in the state, with 17 hospitals and approximately 30,000 employees, it had a relatively robust diversion surveillance program, but different hospitals had different approaches. These ranged from minimal surveillance to regular reporting to basic analytics. In addition, there was no consensus on what an institution-wide program should look like and which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to use to measure the program’s success.

Patient matching when auditing records is a problem many healthcare organizations encounter, but often cannot readily solve with EHRs or various workarounds. Lexington Clinic, Central Kentucky’s largest and oldest private multi-specialty medical group, which serves more than 640,000 patients annually, relied on a “same-last-name” search when auditing records: The compliance team found potential family member employer privacy violations, but also too many false positives for this process to be useful.

Among Protenus’ corporate values is “delight,” a word not heard too often in healthcare compliance offices or tech board rooms, but a word that we always think of when it comes to our annual PANDAS Live conference. Our team is always excited to plan the two-day event, inviting keynote speakers who will inspire attendees, selecting customers to share their accomplishments, and much more. Above all, our team works hard to delight Protenus customers who attend PANDAS, they exceed expectations every single year.