Consistency in HCP Contracting:

Why It’s Important and Best Practices for Improvement

One of the key components of building an effective HCP contracting process is understanding the best way to be consistent and simplify steps as much as possible. Companies can go about this in many ways, but we have some tips to help you get started.

1. Your People

A company’s key leaders have roles that keep them connected to all new and upcoming guidelines or changes, which are disseminated out to the rest of the organization through newsletters, emails, meetings, SOPs, and more.

Best practice: The HCP contracting process leader should hold regular and purposeful sessions with leaders from Legal, Finance, Transparency, and Compliance. The primary topics to discuss:

• What is going well
• What can be improved
• Any upcoming changes in regulations
• How to apply changes to the contracting process

The reason this is important in supporting the consistency in HCP contracting is it allows all stakeholders to share key knowledge, which affects the efficiency of the HCP contracting process. By having an ongoing and frequent dialogue with the key leaders, they are able to drive innovation in the process by sharing HCP contracting process updates out to their teams – but they are also able to bring feedback from their teams.

2. Your Process

As a first step, document your company’s full HCP contracting process end-to-end. Be sure to include everything from the idea of “I want to contract an HCP” to transparency reporting and compliance auditing. Most parts of the process can be captured in quick work instructions or collected from the individual team members who own a particular part.

As you see the full process emerge, document each tiny detail. Learn how each piece leads to the next. This will help emphasize places where simplifications or consistencies can improve your system.

Best practice: Develop a method to capture, evaluate, prioritize, and tackle any ideas that come up as you document the full process. If you do this as you go, you will not forget any of your great ideas along the way.

3. Your Purpose

When you know what each step in your process is, you can document the details of the right way to do each step. As part of the documentation, include the importance of being consistent in areas where it is particularly relevant and the impact of consistency. Specifically, state: “Title your Folder ‘Bob Smith – Advisory Board March_02_2022’” if that is how you need the folders labeled.

Best practice: For example.  With HCP Contracting there can be many documents that need to be filed in a repository for your local compliance team to access and audit from.  Having a consistent file structure, naming convention, and precise documents (and their names too) will make that process so much easier for your auditor, and you.

If you would like to learn more about how we help operations teams improve their HCP Contracting, please contact us.