Ethics - Compliance Survey

The Questions
The most important questions in the minds of your executive leadership and your board are:

• Is our compliance program as good as we want it to be? How would we really know?
  
• Are we spending too much on compliance – or too little?
  
• How do we compare to other organizations with respect to our compliance effort?

If you can not answer these questions, support for the compliance program will always be limited. Executives do not spend money on things that can not be measured. Even an external program assessment is someone’s opinion.

Is there a metric that is accurate, reliable and supportive of true bench marking?

We believe that the Ethics-Compliance Survey provides the only empirically substantiated, reliable measure of a compliance program - short of a government investigation.

Background
The Ethics-Compliance Survey is an empirically validated survey instrument designed to allow organizations to assess their own compliance environments. Development of the Survey began in 1986, with the instrument first administered in 1988. Our goal from the outset was to allow organizations to assess their own compliance environments and generally, to identify best compliance practices. It took two years (1986 – 1988) to validate the Survey and establish the database.

The survey has been administered to healthcare organizations of all types for more than a decade. Each administration allows an organization to assess the responsiveness of employees to ethical and professional standards, the responsiveness of employees to organizational policies, the willingness of employees to utilize internal reporting channels, and employee perception of the organization's compliance climate. Survey results have been published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Bureau of National Affairs (various publications), and the Federal Ethics Report, among others.

Survey Capabilities
Survey administration allows you (at your option) to compare your organization to all healthcare organizations in the database, to all providers in the database or to all health plans in the database. You can also compare locations and functions within your organization and assess differences among employees by level of responsibility and experience. The Survey also allows you to track a number of other factors of potential interest (responsiveness to HR, awareness of the Code of Conduct, attitude toward the “hotline”, etc.). Additional topics may be explored to fit the needs of particular organizations.

To continue reading about the Ethics-Compliance Survey click here.

For more information about the Ethics-Compliance Survey, download the Fact Sheet below or call us at 703-683-7916.