Traditional HIPAA compliance training isn’t working. As it stands, 1 in 10 employees fail to apply the lessons learnt in their everyday roles. This leaves many organizations at risk of regulatory violations and potential data breaches. To combat this pressing problem, the healthcare industry must modernize its training programs via trackable, accessible, and resource rich learning management systems (LMS). In this blog, we explain how Claromentis’ LMS and intranet capabilities can enhance HIPAA understanding, strengthen training initiatives, and boost compliance.
70% of healthcare organizations believe their compliance training programs are effective. But believing can only get you so far.
The harsh reality is, a staggering 80% of healthcare cybersecurity incidents contain a “human element”, meaning employees are at least partly to blame.
Consider recent headline incidents within the industry. Both Change Health and Ascension Health experienced significant damage after cybercriminals exploited weakened systems and ignorant employees. In Ascension Health’s case, an employee downloaded a malicious file that triggered a ransomware attack — resulting in over 5 million patients having their data exposed.
HIPAA compliance training programs should prevent employees from falling for these traps…
And yet they aren’t. In fact, according to recent research, 13% of employees don’t apply the lessons learnt from compliance training in their work. That’s over 1 in 10 employees that could be putting your data at risk.
To prevent history repeating itself, you need to dismantle your outdated HIPAA training programs and rebuild them. In this blog, we explore why traditional training is failing your organization — and how you can fix it.
Why does HIPAA compliance training fail? And why do so many employees fail to instil the lessons taught to them?
We don’t have a definitive answer to these questions. But, what we will say is, the wrong kind of compliance training can often exacerbate weaknesses in your teams and prevent you from keeping pace with emerging threats.
By the “wrong kind” of training, we don’t necessarily mean paper-based or face-to-face training. We’re referring to training that lacks standardization, auditability, and accessibility. Training that provides no proof of completion, no insights into knowledge gaps, and no flexibility to change course content. In other words: training for the sake of training.
Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of HIPAA training many healthcare organizations provide.
Consider the following statistics:
Modernizing your HIPAA compliance training program requires a combination of technological and strategic changes. In the following list, we’ll be focusing on the former:
When push comes to shove, HIPAA training needs to be accessible, trackable, and engaging. This ensures your employees complete the courses, your compliance teams have the granular insights needed to identify and patch-up knowledge gaps, and your auditors receive the documentation necessary to certify your compliance.
A learning management system (LMS) is the ideal way to deliver this standard of training.
Your compliance teams can build engaging modules and pathways for new and existing employees, create bitesize tests, and even assign course tutors for added support. As it’s all digitized, it’s easy enough to update modules and add new learning materials at any point — whether that’s to reflect new HIPAA obligations or react to emerging cybersecurity threats.
Unlike in-person training, LMS based e-learning:
Don’t mistake us — in-person workshops are still highly valuable. In fact, the HIPAA Journal recommends using these “classroom” training sessions for more in-depth learning, where short and sweet courses may not work quite as effectively.
But you should never conduct these training sessions in isolation. To gauge a complete picture of employee compliance, you need to integrate them with your e-learning pathways.
With Claromentis, in-person or virtual events can act as compulsory components of your training programs. In order to pass HIPAA training, your employees will be required to attend these events. Training event organizers can capture evidence of this via enforced attendance mechanisms, which then “completes” the training in the user’s online record.
The next stage in the pathway may require users to complete a quick quiz, testing them on the knowledge acquired during the event.
Policies and compliance procedures are the backbone of HIPAA compliance. Yet they’re often completely isolated from e-learning initiatives. In fact, only 49% of healthcare organizations post code of conduct, policies, and compliance procedures in their LMS platforms. Instead, they favor sharing these documents via employee onboarding sessions and corporate intranets.
This separation of legal literature and training may result in policy non-compliance or a lack of employee understanding. Both of which could be seen as HIPAA violations.
For a more holistic approach, adopt a digital workplace solution that combines intranet and e-learning capabilities. Claromentis is one such example. Our integrated LMS and intranet allow you to store HIPAA policies in the dedicated Policy Manager application, as well as add them as modules in your e-learning pathways. This covers more ground and helps you instil compliance throughout your digital workplace culture.
Your compliance officers may be able to recite HIPAA rules and regulations in their sleep. But your everyday frontline workers? This information can often slip to the bottom of their memory — especially when they have urgent care duties to attend to.
To give your teams the best chance of understanding and complying with HIPAA obligations, provide agentic help wherever possible.
The Claromentis policy management AI assistant ingests each HIPAA policy in its entirety, generates accurate summaries, and provides helpful answers to employee questions. This increases the likelihood of employees actually understanding and embodying the policies you share with them.
In accordance with the HIPAA Privacy Rule, all new employees must be given HIPAA training within a reasonable timeframe of joining your organization. During this period, no matter how short it may be, you may find there’s a gap between technical onboarding and training enrollment.
This may result in your new starters accessing your digital workplace or intranet platform — and any PHI stored within it — before they complete their training. Although you can set granular roles to restrict access to sensitive information, you may then have to manually reinstate new permissions after the HIPAA training has been completed.
This is where automated triggers can be helpful. In a solution like Claromentis, it’s possible to build these triggers into your LMS. After a new employee completes their HIPAA and cybersecurity training courses, the platform will automatically change their permissions settings. You can use this functionality to reveal hidden content across your intranet and digital workplace platform, whether that’s patient documents, more advanced training courses, or automated processes like patient self-referral services.
HIPAA compliance should be a year-round effort, not a one-off annual event. To make this a reality, embed HIPAA lessons throughout your internal communications and digital workplace software.
You need only take one glance at the headlines to know that traditional HIPAA compliance training isn’t working.
Employees aren’t embodying the lessons learned. Organizations aren’t testing thoroughly enough. And “annual-only” training approaches are failing to keep up with rapidly changing HIPAA updates.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. With the right mindset and technology stack, you can build and deliver training that works for everyone — your patients, employees, and auditors included.
This is where Claromentis can help.
Our HIPAA compliant digital workplace solution comprises intranet, e-learning, and business process automation capabilities. It encourages you to; consolidate your compliance resources; digitize your HIPAA training programs; respond quickly to regulatory changes; enforce policy acceptance and improve policy understanding; and pinpoint HIPAA knowledge gaps. It’s also built with heavily regulated industries in mind. You can maintain greater data control with flexible deployment options, safeguard your data via built-in security controls, and turn off any AI capabilities should you wish to.
To find out more about how our solution can modernize your HIPAA training and boost compliance, book a 10-minute discussion call with us today. We’ll discuss your requirements, explore platform features, and build you a bespoke demo environment to trial.