What Wikipedia Can’t Tell You About Your Healthcare Compliance Training, But a Dashboard Can

Data has become the success icon. It’s what many companies and individuals attribute their ‘over-night’ success too and it’s easy to see the insights that can be gathered that others seem to be totally blind too. But how do they do it?

First of all you have to decide what data means to you.

For a care home there are a number of factors that will determine success and high rates of resident approval. Let’s take compliance data which is critical for healthcare in general and not just care homes — it includes a large number of variables and inputs that should paint a picture on your general compliance performance.

If you track and store this data in a spreadsheet, there’s a chance that unless you have a very numerical mind you will probably see nothing but numbers to make the compliance officer happy.

This is where compliance dashboards become a must-have, go-to source of data visualisation and story telling.

Examining Care Home Compliance with Dashboards

When you look at, specifically, care home learning and training, it’s easy to see that the amount of data that can accumulate over time could really help to pinpoint any potential compliance requirements or problems ahead of time.

Let’s say, for example, that your care home is due an inspection — from a care groups perspective they will definitely want to know where they stand in real-time.

Traditional spreadsheets are rarely up-to-date so when a request filters from head office to the care home manager, it could have used up time and resources that a simple compliance dashboard could do with a single click.

Aside from the reporting and dashboards, what else can you learn when you examine your compliance data?

1. Spotting that a specific location or team is struggling to stick to compliance deadlines. Dive deeper and you could find that there isn’t enough staff to cover training schedules.
2. Some individuals are taking too long to complete lessons. You can contact them directly and discuss any issues they may be having.
3. An inspection is due within the next 2 months. Using the compliance matrix you can determine what needs to be done in terms of training, notifications and any additional requirements that there may be.

The point is that once you have a single dashboard which visualises the many data points that your care home’s learning and training data is collecting you can start to plan ahead and ensure your staff and homes go above and beyond any regulation and inspection for your residents.

Cleaning Messy Data

It seems that a fair amount of people we speak too in regards to compliance management are sticking with spreadsheets.

There’s no problem with that at all but maintaining a spreadsheet requires manual updating, it requires individuals to send over certificates and it also requires them to actually complete the task of sending documents over.

From an admin perspective, spreadsheets are rarely up-to-date, mostly missing important data or get updated periodically with a large amount of time being spent on the input and confirmation of data.

If you’re looking for instant, actionable compliance insight into your care home business you need to get up to speed with dashboards and software. Your data can be input easily, notifications can be automated and profiles can be viewed from an admins view.

The actionable insights you will gain from clean, compliance dashboards will not only help with resident satisfaction but it’ll also avoid any regulator issues.

Spreadsheets, unless you have considerable amount of experience or training in just do not provide that sort of actionable insight.

Summing Things Up

Data in general can be overwhelming to the point that the insight you gather seems unactionable.

The key is to have a goal in mind first.

For care home operators compliance is practically number 1 — naturally it would make sense to have a goal of being compliant at all times.

Using a compliance dashboard that uses multiple sources of data will inevitably provide you with an overview of compliance. But the real insight happens when you start to ask questions and dig deeper.