Compliance: Silicon Valley Style

It’s time for the latest installment of Compliance Truth: successful healthcare compliance programs have a great deal in common with Silicon Valley’s latest product design approach, “design thinking.” Savvy compliance officers can learn and apply much from the approach/mindset to their own organization’s program.

I was reminded of this last week when a beloved TV show of mine, HBO’s Silicon Valley, had its season premier. Silicon Valley, both the place and the show, inspire me because they represent traits and values that I believe strong compliance programs embody: authenticity, entrepreneurship, honesty and, sometimes, brashness.

Design thinking is the Valley’s latest approach to effective product design. It is a vast departure from traditional thinking, “go big or go home.” It is the antithesis to what so many organizations do, namely develop big, inflexible compliance programs that do not anticipate failure, are not dynamic, and therefore cannot adapt to change or challenges. In a nutshell, design thinking requires one to: 1) offer a big, potentially disruptive vision, 2) start with a small prototype, 3) fail forward and fail fast, and 4) pivot as needed.

Applied to our compliance world, the steps could be: 1) create or perfect a compliance program that transforms company culture by deeply infusing integrity, 2) identify one or two new/emerging risk areas to start with, through both research and input from the company front lines, 3) implement newly designed audits and training programs, on a limited scale at first, anticipating that changes/improvements will definitely be necessary, and 4) make the necessary changes and repeat the process until the deliverables (ie, policies and procedures, audit tools, training programs) are fully-baked and ready to launch broadly.

An actual example may help. Two areas that immediately come to mind are HIPAA medical record access and medical necessity documentation. These are both important but challenging for many organizations, the first because there is no practical way to audit (unless you have deep technical resources at your disposal), and the second because it largely remains a labor intensive, manual process. So how about pursuing one or two limited-scale projects to explore and identify innovative ways to take on some longstanding, frustrating issues and developing responsive methods that are tailored for your organization? A bite-size, design thinking approach can do just that.

We can learn so much from design thinking. Oftentimes, we become paralyzed trying to address an issue through a massive undertaking when, in fact, a smaller, prototyped project would allow us to explore a range of options, with very limited risk. Some may call this beta-testing. Whatever the term, the goal is to expect and allow for some small failures in order to prevent truly big ones. Call it ‘deliberate, structured learning as you go.’ I would argue that only in this way can a compliance program reach its optimal effectiveness.

We in the healthcare compliance world understand that successful programs must be designed to morph and adapt because the issues they must address, and the fixes to address them, are truly dynamic. The only constant is that new issues will certainly arise and, sometimes, old issues will re-arise, but in new and unexpected ways. Wise compliance officers know how to borrow new ideas from other industries and adapt them for their own use. Design thinking is ripe for the taking and we should grab it and milk it for everything it’s worth.