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HSC Compliance Office

 Message from Stuart Freedman,
 Chief Compliance Officer

stuart

When I ask to schedule meetings with people, their first response is often, "Oh no, what did I do wrong?" At HSC Compliance, we are trying to overcome those feelings of uncertainty and worry through the power of engagement. What do we mean by engagement? To us, it is focusing on bringing people together and involving them in creating new and better compliance solutions for the HSC.

Over the last year we've already taken steps to engage you in our program. We asked for your feedback with our first ever compliance satisfaction survey and your feedback has reinforceed our plans for the future. When it came time to redo our Compliance training, we formed a focus group of people from the HSC community and incorporated their thoughts and suggestions. Our project to rewrite our Code of Ethics involved people from all parts of the organization: nurses, researchers, physicians, and many others. This is only the beginning.

Next time you hear from us, don't feel intimidated. Instead, let us know how we can help you. Ask us questions. Make suggestions. Join us and get engaged!


The HSC Compliance Office is charged with coordinating and overseeing compliance activities at all of the entities that make up the HSC, including the School of Medicine, College of Nursing, College of Pharmacy, HSC Office of Research, UNM Hospitals, UNM Medical Group, Sandoval Regional Medical Center, UNM Cancer Center, and HSLIC. We also coordinate and oversee efforts in the areas of HIPAA Privacy and Security.

What is "compliance"?

Compliance is a lot more than merely following the rules; it is empowering all members of the HSC community to do the right thing. We do this by providing education and training, developing policies and procedures, providing an anonymous reporting hotline, and using auditing, monitoring, and investigations to ensure that we, as an institution, are doing the right thing.

  • Education and Training: We offer live and online training to the HSC. Not only are the standard training modules on Learning Central available, but we also provide customized compliance training to your department upon request. (To request custom training, please contact us.)

  • Policies and Procedures: HSC Compliance owns a variety of policies and procedures, the most important of which is the HSC Code of Ethics. The HSC Code of Ethics sets the minimum standard for good behavior by members of the HSC community.

  • Anonymous Reporting Hotline: We contract with a vendor to offer an anonymous compliance reporting hotline. This is a way for anyone to ask questions or report compliance concerns anonymously.

  • Auditing, Monitoring, and Investigations: In order to ensure that the HSC is doing the right thing and following the law, we coordinate auditing, monitoring, and investigatory efforts. This allows us to better protect the organization in a number of ways, such as identifying training or policy gaps.

We recognize that the all of us want to do the right thing to better serve our patients, our students, and our community. Our job is to help you do that.

Each month, we post stories about things happening in the world of healthcare compliance. For information from the news about recent problems experienced by other healthcare entities and all of the good things we are doing here at the HSC, please take a look at our Compliance News page.