How to Compare Tools for Healthcare Compliance and Regulation
Choosing a new platform for managing your healthcare policies and documents is stressful. Like other major decisions, selecting the wrong solution could result in staff inefficiencies and even noncompliance.
Yet, with so many policy and compliance solutions on the market, how do you know which is the best one for your organization? Most vendors offer similar features and make many of the same promises. So how do you effectively compare and contrast your options to decide a winner in the race for your hard-earned trust and resources?
We’ve compiled a list of questions for you to ask your potential vendors and the key features to look for as you survey the market.  This tool will help you to simplify your selection process and zero in on the best software partner for your organization.
Start at the very beginning: Take an inventory of your organization’s needs
Before you consider vendors, you must first look inward. Determine the issues your organization’s compliance directors and policy managers face every day and develop a set of goals or outcomes you want to achieve. Then ask:
- Does your staff depend on manual processes, automated systems, or a combination of both?
- What gaps or roadblocks create bottlenecks that slow daily processes and workflows?
- Are complaints centered around lack of efficiency, paper overload, storage chaos, data protection concerns, lack of version control, or something else?
- If you could implement the right tool today, how would it benefit your staff and organization as a whole? What would it improve, speed up, streamline, or secure?
Once you have performed the initial analysis of your organization’s needs, it’s time to map out a decision.
Comparing and Contrasting Vendors is a Multi-Step Process
Compliance requires adapting to ever-changing regulations and standards, and consistently updating policies and procedures across the organization. To stay ahead of the regulatory curve, while enabling the highest on-the-job efficiency, the right tool has to offer leading-edge technology and end-to-end service.
This means, at a minimum, it has to be web-based, built for healthcare, capable of supporting various document types, and easily scalable.
When evaluating your options, pay close attention to vendors whose platforms are unable to meet each of these criteria fully because these vendors will ultimately end up creating more headaches for your staff while delivering lower return on your investment. In fact, you are probably safe to disregard them.
With the initial winnowing complete, you’re ready for a deeper dive.
The right tool must eliminate time-consuming manual processes that lead to document inconsistencies, errors, missed approvals, and version confusion. The right tool should allow your team to do far more work with far less effort and empower them to drive operational excellence through:
- Role-based access controls (RBAC) to establish who can create, view, or edit documents based on department, job title, and responsibilities to ensure only   authorized users are impacting critical documents.
- Template-based creation to allow for feedback, editing, and tracked changes. Connected documents make content authoring easier and more efficient.
- Automated review and approval workflows, version control and archiving, reminders and notifications—including expiration dates.
- In-depth and on-demand usage reports and other custom reports that can be exported and shared automatically via email.
A Stand-alone Choice: MCN Healthcare Comes out on Top
There are a few high-profile vendors that offer attractive solutions, but MCN Healthcare is the only software provider in the industry with an end-to-end document management solution that allows your organization to customize and control every aspect of your document management process.
MCN’s Policy Manager – simplifies everything from document creation and storage to approvals routing and updating tomes of documents simultaneously. Unlike other solutions, Policy Manager is designed with an intuitive, familiar interface featuring easy-to-recognize full-text searching and results filtering, print-friendly previews, and one-touch email sharing capabilities to allow everyone on the team to work quickly, efficiently, and with minimal support.
MCN’s Policy Library – encompassing some 18,000 downloadable and customizable policies and procedures—speeds up the document creation process and ensures compliance through careful authorship by regulatory experts. When regulatory changes happen, MCN’s StayAlert! and StayAlert! Plus automatically notify staff and find relevant documents that may need to be updated.
MCN’s Contract Manager– simplifies and automates the process of creating, editing and signing contracts.  C-Suite, Compliance Officers, Supply Chain Directors and legal teams are ensured every contract is handled correctly and efficiently, without missed steps or misplaced information.
MCN’s eLearning – intuitive web-based training program and content allows you to easily plan, assign, test, track, and report on education activities, both online and instructor-led.
With MCN’s end-to-end document management solution, policy documents can be directly associated to specific regulations to make finding and editing documents simpler and faster than before. In addition, MCN Policy Manager automatically captures any changes to documents or workflows and logs them in an exportable audit log to better support compliance efforts.
MCN solutions are built specifically for the healthcare industry, they have been meticulously developed to deploy software as a service without additional plugins or downloads and feature automatic data backup, encryption, and updates. Â In addition, MCN tools integrate with essential systems like LDAP/Active Directories for a cohesive, consistent policy management and compliance experience.
What truly sets MCN Healthcare apart from the pack is the commitment to ongoing training and support. Now, all healthcare organizations can easily transition to MCN’s document management solution using a step-by-step implementation that includes ongoing support and continuous training.
MCN’s customer-first approach eases what can often feel like an overwhelming process, ensures a smoother transition, and encourages user adoption through a variety of ongoing training and support methods—helping to validate and safeguard your organization’s investment. Together, MCN’s platform helps healthcare organizations earn:
- Faster, more streamlined workflows
- Greater efficiency and accuracy
- Confidence in user and data security
- Modern, electronic document creation and management to reduce paper and physical storage
- Peace of mind that your organization is compliant, and all policies are up-to-date
Find out how MCN Healthcare is setting the standard for efficient, cost-effective policy management.
MCN HEALTHCARE
Document Compliance Software Solutions
For Healthcare. By Healthcare Experts.
 Policy Management Software | Policy Library