Most clinic owners probably spend time developing their policies and procedures prior to opening their practice; however, they can quickly be pushed to the back burner once daily life in the clinic picks up (i.e. treating patients, marketing, hiring and developing staff, and the list is endless!). Maintaining clinic policies and procedures and updating them when necessary is critical to ensuring you’re within compliance, but how often does this need to happen? Let’s explore how often you should reconsider your clinic policies and procedures.

Reevaluate Your Clinic’s Policies and Procedures

While reviewing your policies and procedures, we encourage you to make changes to ensure that they are up to date with industry and world happenings. As we all know, this became even more important with the onset of COVID-19. Make sure your staff and patients understand what is required of them, and it will help mitigate risk and exposure to business altercations.

Regularly reviewing your policies and procedures is also critical from a legal perspective. Obviously, practice owners never want to find themselves, their staff, and/or their patients in a legally compromising situation. Ensuring that your clinical policies and procedures are in alignment with local, state, and federal ordinances is key to minimizing those chances. If you work with a lawyer or legal team, it may be beneficial to have them review relevant policies and procedures to make sure you are covered on all fronts.

Additionally, it is recommended to institute or change policies and procedures with a proactive approach in mind. For example, try to think through possible scenarios that might arise and create policies to help address those instead of waiting for something to occur and then developing a policy or procedure in response to that. Of course, there will be some situations that you cannot foresee; however, doing your best to stay on top of these situations will be make managing those situations much more effective.

Factors in Reviewing Clinic Policies and Procedures

• Review everything from a legal perspective and seek legal guidance when necessary.

• Make sure policies and procedures are in alignment with industry best practices.

• Review the wording of each policy and consider having a few people read over the changes so that you can avoid misunderstandings and miscommunication.

• Within a pandemic scenario like COVID-19, policies and procedures are almost certainly going to have to change more often. Make sure staff and patients alike know what the requirements are through consistent, frequent communication, and patient and provider satisfaction will both be positively impacted. In light of the pandemic, ensure that your COVID-19 policies are up- to- date. We all know rules change frequently and making sure that patients know what is expected of them (i.e. temperature checks, vaccination requirements, mask requirements, etc.) before arriving will help them have a better experience at your clinic. On a similar note, make sure your staff members understand the COVID-19 policies as they apply to themselves and patients.
• For staff,: review in office etiquette, cell phone, dress code, escalation, technology compensation, overtime, work from home, and time off policies and procedures.

• For patients:, review HIPPA, release of information, assignment of benefits, insurance, cancel, late-cancel, no show, and financial policies.

• If you treat special patient populations like worker’s compensation, auto accident, minors, etc., ensure those policies are up to date as well and in alignment with industry rules and regulations.