Greg Keilin When is Best to Focus on Compliance Hiring a Consultant

Conquer the complexities of compliance in the behavioral health sector with our expert guest in this enlightening episode. Whether you're embarking on a new startup or refining your established facility, you're about to unearth the indispensable role of compliance. Not just a tedious adherence to regulations, compliance is the bedrock of your business plan and operational strategy, and we reveal exactly why.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Hatching Creativity. This isn't just another behavioral health podcast. This is the place where thought leaders converge to talk about real-life challenges, breakthroughs and pivotal aha moments.

Speaker 2: 0:18

When you're talking to somebody who is starting a new facility, how should they be thinking about the right cost benefit of investing time and energy and money into compliance? Because it's a very different proposition when you're just getting started versus if you're a big, established company.

Speaker 1: 0:35

For sure. Well, it's so much easier when you're first getting started. That's the first thing. You're not trying to untrain bad habits. But I want to frame what compliance actually is, because this really is helpful. Compliance is adherence to a set of minimum requirements set forth by an accrediting agency or licensing body. So all they're asking you to do is adhere to a certain level, to a set of minimum quality standards, and that's all compliance is. And then, as it relates to creating a good compliance program from the beginning and I'm going to throw some bullets out there of some things that I think would be helpful for people looking to open treatment centers too but your compliance program is your business plan, this is your operating plan. This is how you make sure that your clinical documentation is done properly so that your clients get proper care. It makes sure that your environment of care and your physical plant is safe and conducive to a healing environment, and it makes sure that your staff is educated and trained and competent in treating the population that your treatment center is treating. So, yes, it's tedious, there's a lot to do. That's exactly why we created our software is to guide people so that they know what they need to do, how to do it and when different things are due, because just doing the documentation is time consuming enough, but needing to understand what you need to do is also very tedious and very time consuming. I would say, if you're looking to open a treatment center, if your plan is to just wing it, you have another thing coming for you, especially with the evolving landscape that we have right now. That's a very bad idea, but I would always be willing to get myself or one of my teammates on call with somebody to discuss what is and why it's important. Another thing that I just want to mention for people looking to start a new treatment center One.

Speaker 1: 2:59

A lot of people are hiring consultants, which is part of the reason why we have a consulting practice, but I want to give a couple of things to look for or to kind of be red flags for consultants. There's no license really to be a consultant, meaning anybody can call themselves a consultant, and we see this all the time. They're not necessarily created equal. If you are going to hire a consultant, do some research, do some looking around, figure out who you're dealing with and also understand their methodology, because you have certain consultants that are going to send you an email once a month telling you that this is what needs to be done, and then you're going to have consultants that meet with you on a weekly basis reviewing what you've done and what needs to be done and looking at your data and helping you with that. You're not always getting the same thing from each consultant. You're not getting the same experience. You're not getting that same level of knowledge. So one of the things you want to look at is that.

Speaker 1: 4:05

Another thing is, if you are looking to open up your own center, do not just go and buy policies. Don't ask for policies from somebody else. Don't take another business's policies. If a consultant is going to just wing you a set of policies, don't take it. Understand that your policies are your business plan. This is the key to how things are done what is done, what your expectations are of your staff, what people should be expecting of you. Your policies are really important and, to top it off, what you're going to be held accountable for. Every once in a while, you see things like oh, we're gonna do fire drills three times a month because we want to be super safe, and they put it in their policy. And then they do fire drills once every Six weeks because things get busy and they don't have the time. They end up getting cited for that and that's a very serious citation because it's dealing with life safety. Make sure you know what is in your policies. Make sure your policies are accessible to your team and Read your policies and read them.

Speaker 1: 5:18

The last thing I want to mention is it relates to consultants is Oftentimes you get what you pay for and you want to. When you're vetting consultants, consider that we were asked not that long ago. Somebody said to me you know what would it cost to get a facility licensed in XYZ? We sent them back a response. It was somewhere in the 10 to 12 thousand dollar range and the guy responded and said there's this one guy that Knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. He was going to do the same thing for $1,200. Can you match that you got to be aware of Of of what people are doing? If somebody's doing that for $1,200, he's just sending you a copy of somebody else's. It may be changing the names, but you're putting yourself at significant risk. You know. Those are a few things really to look at for people getting in.

Speaker 2: 6:16

Well, there's a couple things that you just said, mike, that I want to circle back to, because I think that there's a couple of important points here. One is I really like this, this thing that you said about like, your policies are your business plans, compliance is your business plan. I think that most people get into this field wanting to do good for people and they're opening a treatment center because they want to provide great care to a population that's in need, and and so I think that it's really important to one of the things that you've said to me in the past that has really helped me Understand this, this aspect of our field. Better is that compliance is fundamentally best practices. Right, like the way to think about a compliance plan.

Speaker 2: 6:56

To your point about you know the, the fire drills right, there is a, there is a best practice with respect to how frequently you should have a fire drill. There are regulations around that, but there are also just sort of lived experience that's gone into people figuring out what the right frequency is to make sure that you're not disrupting the operations too much, but that you're making sure that everybody is trained and aware of this. You know Evacuation plans and all that stuff. So, fundamentally, I think one of the things that I Wanted to just underline that you said is that, like when you're thinking about compliance as a startup, you're really thinking about how.