From the November 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Hidden cost 2: Loss of talent
Reputation is paramount in healthcare, but not just for patients.
Competition for the best talent in healthcare is fierce today, and the most sought-after potential employees are likely motivated by altruism and idealism as well as compensation. Noncompliance threatens the case healthcare organizations can make to potential hires. With a black mark on their record, how can they claim to put patients first, to protect patient and staff safety, and to be a place where anybody would be proud to work?
(In many jurisdictions, hospitals are also ordered to post when they have committed a violation—a public acknowledgement that might also affect employee pride, morale, and even retention.)
Hidden cost 3: Overcompensation
Most of this column has discussed noncompliance in general terms. But there is a special fear around radiation safety and its breaches. From the recent Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe to the popularity of the HBO series “Chernobyl,” the public is on high alert for stories and realities of radiation-related devastation. This fear — not least due to the association of radiation exposure with cancer — may translate into overcompensation when a facility is found to be out of compliance in matters of radiation safety.
This overcompensation may manifest in extra scrutiny from external agencies; internal overcompensation in the form of new hires, redundant meetings, and expensive administrative input; and even in impractical or questionably effective legislation.
The perfect storm of overcompensation might look like this: a hospital miscalibrates or inputs a bad protocol on a CT machine and ends up harming patients, which in turn leads to rightful sanctions from CMS and the Joint Commission as well as press coverage of the suffering caused. Instead of treating this as a single incident, state regulatory agencies tighten the guidelines that would have actually protected those patients had they been followed. Other agencies learn of the violation and question whether they had missed something in their earlier assessments; they increase their scrutiny and launch additional investigations of the same hospital. Meanwhile, the hospital conducts a series of fact-finding and problem-solving meetings — that include many of the facility’s top-paid administrators as well as the technologists, directors, and others on the professional and administrative staff. Those meetings (hidden costs of noncompliance, all) result in the hospital hiring a consulting group or adding full-time employees to augment their quality assurance team so that they can, in essence, overcomply. The state is happy to receive the reassurance of the extra documentation and reports. But no matter whether the hospital is 100% in compliance or 150%, as it were, the reputational damage remains—and so the losses to patient volume and talent attraction remain as well.
