Chartwell: Compliance

Compliance Services

In the first of Chartwell's ten core values, we pledge to maintain integrity by "conducting all our business with the highest level of honesty, fairness, dependability and ethical standards." We pride ourselves on providing excellence in patient care by adhering to standards set by regulatory bodies and other third-party organizations, as well as by our own internal demands. However, excellence means we not only provide sound clinical care, it also means we must strive to earn the trust of our patients, payers and communities. At both the branch and corporate level, ethics and responsibility are paramount.

Central to this mission are our departments of compliance and professional services. These teams provide our staff with tools to maintain the highest standards of patient care, safety, reimbursement and financial integrity, sales and marketing, avoidance of conflict of interest in business relationships, contract management and all other business operations.

Compliance

Chartwell maintains an in-house team of certified compliance experts, led by Judith Rooney RN, CHC. All compliance staff members are certified in healthcare compliance (C.H.C.) by the Health Care Compliance Association. Our team ensures the company acts in accordance with standards set by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), the Anti-Kickback Statute of the Social Security Act, Stark II regulations, among other agencies and regulations. All our infusion/respiratory businesses are accredited.

One responsibility of the compliance department is to develop and update employee-training programs. All new staff undergoes compliance training and then updates their knowledge with yearly refresher courses. Their education addresses, among other items, the procedures by which an employee may anonymously report a believed infraction of policy or violation of law, in accordance with our open disclosure philosophy.

A major focus of our team has been ensuring Chartwell complies with the new privacy and security provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. HIPAA is a federal law requiring all healthcare providers establish practices protecting patient privacy/security and simplifying administrative processes. All providers needed to develop and implement a plan by April 2004, and our compliance team, working entirely in-house, accomplished this ahead of schedule.

Process Improvement Program

To Chartwell, quality assurance is not enough; at a minimum, all satisfactory home healthcare organizations are expected to ensure quality. Truly excellent providers go "above and beyond" by establishing standards apart from those of accrediting agencies and licensing boards.

Chartwell strives for excellence by continually analyzing and bettering our practices through our Process Improvement Program (PIP) for infusion/respiratory businesses and our Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement Program (QAPI) for attendant care. These programs maximize the efficiency of our processes and strengthen all checkpoints in the delivery of care.

PIP utilizes frequent internal and external audits, as well as employee competency programs, to measure outcomes against company-driven standards. We monitor our performance throughout the year, not just during audit periods. Success indicators include, but are not limited to, re-hospitalizations, patient compliance with treatment plans and productivity. We aggregate the data into sophisticated software programs and analyze the results in real time, allowing us to immediately identify any shortcoming and implement a plan of correction.