Vendor risk management, as its name suggests, involves assessing and mitigating risks from third party vendors. During this process, you should evaluate your third party partners’ capabilities, trustworthiness, and reliability.
In this blog post, let’s discuss how to choose vendor risk software that enables you to conduct this due diligence with accuracy and consistency. Ultimately, this will promote greater efficiency and security in your healthcare organization.
Vendor Risk Management Software 101
This type of software is a specialized tool to help your organization identify and manage inherent risks associated with third party suppliers.
Vendor risk management software features typically include reporting tools, assessments, contract management, and integration with other risk management tools.
The right software helps to ensure that the vendors you partner with provide high quality goods and services, while protecting patient data.
Read this post to learn about more facts and challenges regarding mitigating third party vendor risks.
Why You Should Invest In Software For Managing Vendor Risks
Some of the primary reasons to use software to assess and mitigate third party vendor risks are:
Automate Your Process
Aiming to verify that every single one of your vendors adheres to safety protocols can become a monumental task. Utilizing software allows for automation while identifying, assessing, and/or mitigating various risks. It reduces the resources and time you must expend within your healthcare organization.
Promote Collaboration and Communication
Transparent communication is essential for reducing third party vendor risks. With a central platform for communication and risk management, you can foster collaboration and team-based decision making.
Achieve A Comprehensive Risk Overview
Gain a larger perspective of your vendor activities and management with the right healthcare risk management software.
Understand each partner’s associated risks, performance, and capability to deliver quality service while safeguarding protected healthcare information (PHI).
Comply With Regulations
Your healthcare organization is not just subject to regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. Additionally, new legislation makes you responsible for mitigating risks that your third party vendors may bring.
Software allows you to organize your compliance program and respond to risks in real time — avoiding breaches and fines.
Strengthen Vendor Relationships
With software-enabled vendor risk management, you can promote trust, teamwork, and communication between your healthcare organization and partners. Data, instead of emotions, can help enforce standards and expectations.
How To Choose The Right Vendor Risk Software
There are several factors to consider when evaluating which software you should select, such as:
Features
Since you must monitor business associates (BAs) as part of the HIPAA-HITECH Omnibus final rule, robust features are crucial. The majority of healthcare facilities manage hundreds of BA agreements — an almost impossible task without software and automation.
That is why ComplyAssistant provides features that allow you to manage unlimited BAs. You can assess their level of risk, receive notifications, track delivery, and generate detailed reports and summaries.
Usability
Instead of handling countless spreadsheets, everything you need to manage your compliance program is in one place with ComplyAssistant software.
Ease of use is essential for minimizing human input errors and additional mistakes — while providing accurate information to organizational stakeholders.
Integration
Your vendor risk management tools should integrate with other information systems, CRMs, and project management software. This helps to maintain a comprehensive understanding of where risks lie and what their underlying causes are.
The Provider
While the features and usability of the software itself are key factors, the provider of the software is equally as important.
Ensure that the software company you select has a proven history of customer support, integrity, and experience. They should provide real examples and demos of their software during the consultation process.
Minimizing Risk With Healthcare Software
At ComplyAssistant, we’ve provided risk management for third party vendors to a variety of healthcare organizations. Our team is dedicated to providing powerful, scalable software along with assistance and clarification about usage and optimization.
Contact us today to see how our technology can empower your healthcare firm to provide higher quality care, comply with regulations, and promote a stronger partnership with your business associates.