Ironically, security demands have only grown over time, but vendors and providers alike are finding that the very automation that initially seemed incompatible with such rigorous compliance policies is in fact the answer. Automation not only possesses the potential to meet such demands, but when executed thoughtfully, can exceed them.
Anyone who moves in the security space will affirm that the most vulnerable dimension of any organization is the people who are part of it. Perfectly executed technological security will ultimately provide no value when paired with people who are ill-equipped or undertrained. At Eligible, where we process millions of healthcare billing cases per month, we’ve taken automation one step further, applying the same security measures to our internal team and organization as we’ve built into our platform. In other words, we’ve integrated compliance into not only our day-to-day operations but into our company culture as well. Embedding security compliance in this way makes it a key aspect of every employee’s role and brings every member of the team up to a level where they can effectively participate as part of the organization’s security machinery.
To streamline and standardize this process, we have developed a homegrown solution—a policies app—for managing policy compliance and training, which is built in-house and customized to the organization’s exact needs. This provides a consistent method of communicating professional responsibilities to each individual while tracking comprehension and ensuring accountability.
The effort invested in documenting and defining standards for infrastructure, software, and staff policies have reaped significant benefits for the Eligible team since implementation. Compliance monitoring and reporting is now fed directly into workflow and product monitoring, providing a continuous oversight of all that is being done in real time to identify potential threats and keep ahead of consumer demand. Workflow automation has eliminated error prone manual processes and freed staff to invest their time and resources in new products, not maintaining old processes. This success has also been externally validated. Since launching the policies app in 2016, Eligible has secured and renewed our HITRUST Certification, SOC2 Certification, and EHNAC Cloud-Enabled Accreditation.
Though rightfully wary and slow to embrace change, as an industry, we’re collectively beginning to realize the full potential of automation and the impact it can have on modern healthcare. While the end goal is to eliminate human error and increase overall efficiency, it is important to consider that there are aspects of security compliance that we cannot, and perhaps should not, automate. When thoughtfully applied, automation can simultaneously control for the vulnerabilities associated with human involvement, while maintaining the true heartbeat of healthcare: the people who it make it possible. By controlling for security on a fundamental level, we combine the best of human and technological ingenuity to navigate the industry’s numerous complexities and keep pace with other consumer-facing sectors.
