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Part 1 of a two-part series on how compliance services work. Most healthcare leaders picture a consultant who hands over a binder and walks away. On this episode of The Compliance Advantage, host Ross Ronan and Devin Dalton, VP of Client Development at Marwood Group, lay out a different model: outsourced compliance as an extension of your team, not a report that sits on a shelf. They start where most executives start: a compliance risk assessment every two to three years, and the deeper look Ronan calls Risk Assessment Plus+, which adds a third-party coding and billing audit on top of the gap analysis. Ronan explains why an annual revenue cycle review is not the same thing: a code that is 100% wrong can get washed out to a 5% error rate when averaged against everything else, but the Office of Inspector General and the Department of Justice look at that one code. From there the conversation turns to what good looks like. A 100-day plan becomes the roadmap, and an outsourced compliance officer stands up the program from day one, owns the compliance function, and partners with HR, quality, and operations without taking them over. Ronan and Dalton walk through the client profile that fits best, higher government payer mix and real exposure, and are candid about telling a prospect when the answer is no. The throughline is the one Ronan returns to often: compliance is a strategic investment and a competitive advantage to budget for, not a cost to minimize.
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What is the difference between a compliance risk assessment and an annual revenue cycle review?
A revenue cycle review looks for ways to improve revenue across all your codes, so a single code that is 100% wrong can get averaged down into a low overall error rate. A compliance risk assessment looks at the program the way regulators do, including the Office of Inspector General, the Department of Justice, and audit contractors, and pinpoints the specific high-risk codes and gaps that drive real exposure.When should a healthcare organization choose Risk Assessment Plus+ over a standard risk assessment?
Do a third-party risk assessment every two to three years. Add Risk Assessment Plus+, which includes a coding and billing audit, when you want a hold on potential billing exposures and a clear picture of your ability to participate in federal healthcare programs. Ross Ronan describes it as a kind of reverse due diligence.What does outsourced compliance actually mean day to day?
It means a fractional compliance program that runs for you, with a named compliance officer who owns the compliance function from day one. It is an extension of your workforce, not a consultant who delivers a report and walks away. The team provides professional services, stands up the program, and operates it with your approval.
What kind of healthcare organization is the best fit for outsourced compliance?
Organizations with real government payer exposure, often around $50 to $75 million in revenue with 40% or more Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, are the sweet spot. Very large, high-exposure organizations usually need a full-time program, and low-exposure organizations can often support a smaller internal owner instead.
What do the first 90 days of building a compliance program look like?
If there is no recent risk assessment, it starts with one. Then the team builds leadership first, standing up the executive committee and board committees, followed by the disclosure program and the auditing and monitoring function. Ross Ronan calls the disclosure program and auditing the windows to the soul of an organization.
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Compliance Services, Part 1: How Does Outsourced Healthcare Compliance Work? (with Devin Dalton)
Welcome
Ross Ronan (00:45)
Welcome back to the Compliance Advantage. We haven't really had a conversation about what we do and how we do it, and then giving the guidance to those CEOs and leaders of these growing healthcare organizations. I think it's very insightful, so that people understand what those services are, how they work, and how they can use them in their organizations today. Today we have a very special guest, Devin Dalton. She is on every one of our business development calls and has been with the company for quite some time, I would say from the beginning. So welcome, Devin. Appreciate you being here.
Devin Dalton (01:14)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Ross Ronan (01:16)
Of course. Today's going to be a practical guide, as well as the rest of the series. I'm just going to hand it over to Devin to kick us off with some questions and some very insightful conversations.
Where to Start: The Risk Assessment and Risk Assessment Plus+
Devin Dalton (01:33)
Appreciate that, Ross. So let's just start with the foundation here. When executives come to you for the first time looking to assess their gaps or current exposure, where would you tell them to start?
Ross Ronan (01:45)
When CEOs first acknowledge that they want to take a look at their organization, that's really a first win. They want to look at their organization for the risk factors. They want to understand where they may have gaps in their compliance program, or areas they may not be focusing on when it comes to exposures they may have. So when we start looking at an organization, they come to us and say, "What do we do first?" Really, it starts out with a risk assessment, and we also tag on what we call a Risk Assessment Plus+. I'll tell you a little bit about what those two things are.
The OIG, when they came out with their guidance with the General Compliance Program Guidance, actually put as one of the elements, which we often laugh about in the compliance world, what is essentially the eighth element as opposed to the seven elements they originally had. We really look at the risk assessment being one of those eight elements, because they wanted to show that the compliance program and the company are really assessing their risks.
When you look at the risk assessment, and I'm not talking about an enterprise risk assessment, because those happen across the board, with lots of different departments involved, whether it's IT or internal audit, they'll do a whole entire enterprise that takes months and months to put together with a game plan. I'm talking about a compliance risk assessment, where you really look at the compliance program and see where the gaps are. You interview the right levels of CEOs and leadership to get that understanding of what is really going on.
Risk Assessment Plus+ takes it one step further. We almost call it like a reverse due diligence. You're not only doing a compliance program gaps analysis, or looking at anything the company feels is a risk factor, we're also looking at their coding and their billing, and their ability to participate in federal healthcare programs, which is a big risk factor in and of itself. We really like to dive into both of those aspects.
Devin Dalton (03:53)
Just curious, when would you suggest a Risk Assessment Plus+ over a risk assessment for a CEO coming to you trying to identify certain exposures or gaps?
Ross Ronan (04:04)
That's a really good question. Right off the bat, I think you should be doing a risk assessment every two to three years by a third party. Your internal compliance program should be doing them every year anyway. But to bring someone in as an outside advisor every two to three years to look at your compliance program, and if you really want to get a hold on potential billing exposures, and exposures where you feel like you're just not getting what you need from your internal program, that's when you add the audit on top of that. They can tell you where your other risk exposures may be from a third party's perspective, which doesn't necessarily come with your regular risk assessment.
Devin Dalton (04:49)
And I want to go back to the point you made about having a review every two to three years. I feel like a common misconception we get from clients is that they have an annual billing review that might not be encompassing of that full compliance risk assessment. So could you talk a little bit about what the difference is there?
Ross Ronan (05:11)
That's a really good question. We get this question a lot. It's really funny. We see, "Hey, we have our financial audit. We have our big revenue cycle audit every year. They come in, they look at all of our codes, they look at down codes and up codes, they look at the wrong codes, and they tell us where we can improve our revenue." It's more of a revenue cycle piece of it. You're right, they really do miss the compliance angle, which is, what is the OIG going to look at? What's the DOJ going to look at? What are Targeted Probe and Educate reviews, Recovery Audit Contractors, and Unified Program Integrity Contractor audits going to look at when it comes to a very specific code utilization review? You're really looking at it from a compliance perspective versus this overarching revenue cycle issue.
We get this a lot, because they'll say, "I have my annual revenue cycle review, and they say it's all good and we're good." And we're like, "Okay, well, let us see it." How many times have we said, "Let us see your annual revenue cycle review"? A lot. And they go, "Okay, here you go." We look at it, and there are 50 CPT codes on this thing. We go, "Okay, let's look at their highly utilized codes." They've billed out a bunch of 99215s or 99310s or whatever. We look at that specific error rate, and the audit actually did 20 of those codes, and guess what? All 20 were wrong. Then you weight it with all the other CPT codes that are down there, and your average comes out to be less than a 5% error rate, or a 95% accuracy rate. But that one code was 100% wrong. They don't really pinpoint that. It all gets washed out.
That's why I would highly suggest doing that Risk Assessment Plus+ in combination with the compliance program. It really does look at the exposures, and where the government will also look.
Devin Dalton (07:02)
And I feel like it's such a game changer at the end of this process. Executives a lot of the time think they have a guess at where their compliance program stands, but this really gives a clear picture on what the gaps and exposures are, and how to go execute certain things.
Ross Ronan (07:17)
Absolutely, and everybody wants to know. As soon as we're done with it, the board asks the question, the CEO asks the question, "Can I see it? Can you read it out to me? Let us know where we need to improve."
Devin Dalton (07:27)
So just wrapping up the risk assessment and Risk Assessment Plus+, like I said, at the end of that you get this full picture of where your gaps and exposures are, and then the next task is to go do something about this, right? So when do you find that CEOs or high-level C-suite individuals really choose to outsource their compliance function once they get that full picture?
From the 100-Day Plan to the Decision to Outsource
Ross Ronan (07:59)
It's funny, because when we look at the risk assessment, one of the things we do, and I say this all the time, I learned it from a lot of mentors in my life: information is free and execution is paid for. At the end of our risk assessment, we always put a 100-day plan in there, and this is your roadmap to success. When you get that and look at it and you're like, "Okay, these are the things I need to fix and change," that's when you can really start to sit down and reassess what you need.
If you're looking at starting a compliance program, obviously there are lots of different ways you can go. If you're looking at enhancing your compliance program, you can make some decisions on internal versus outsource. And when you have an established program, and maybe it's just not functioning the way it needs to, or you just need to enhance it a little bit, that's when you can start to choose whether or not you use external resources to come in and help you build it. When that executive gets that report and starts to decide what to do, they look at it and go, "Can we do it ourselves? Can we not do it ourselves?" There are all these different options of what you're trying to fix. The first thing is they have to figure out what they're trying to fix. Are they trying to establish a program? Are they trying to enhance it? Are they trying to redo it?
So when you say outsourced, it really becomes: we come in, we run their compliance program, and we own that compliance function. We have two different levels of service that we provide. It's really funny, because everybody wants some sort of variation of a level of service. They're like, "I want just a modified version of this and a modified version of that." We don't do that. We're either outsourced or we're support services, and there are three levels of outsource.
The outsource is really us coming in and taking that 100-day plan, that we either developed or somebody else developed, and standing up the infrastructure of that compliance program, the seven and eight elements, and also making sure we are running the program. So we often say, from day one on an outsource, you have a compliance program. You have a compliance officer standing there, making calls. We're essentially an augmentation of your workforce. We provide professional services, not consulting services. We don't tell you what to do. We actually say, "This is what we're going to do," and then we go out and do it with your approval. So that outsource piece is really us coming in, running the program, standing it up, doing all the things we said should be done, in addition to being the compliance executive for the organization who can be a strategic partner to the CEO and the board.
Additionally, we have support services. This is really when I started to say, do you need a compliance program, do you need to enhance your compliance program, or do you just need support for it? Our support services, which I think is really important, augment that existing workforce for an existing compliance program. What that does is allow a compliance officer, compliance executive, or director of compliance to focus on the strategy they need to do without having to worry about the day-to-day stuff: your helpline contacts, your investigations, your policy and procedure reviews, your scopes of work for your audits, starting those. They can do the overarching guidance as well as make those big strategic decisions. We also tag on a compliance executive to help advise those individuals on what they should do in certain situations. I find that really important, because I've been a compliance officer for 20 years, and there's not a time where I don't have an issue that comes up that I just need to bounce off somebody. Whether it's you, some of the other compliance executives, a general counsel, or a lawyer, I need to sit down and go, "What do you think about this False Claims Act issue, or this Anti-Kickback Statute issue?" So it's always nice to have that support services around.
Devin Dalton (11:00)
And with the outsource perspective, you touched on a really important aspect: we are not consultants, we're an extension of your workforce. So one of the main questions we get a lot is, how do you collaborate with other departments within the organization? With IT or HR or operations. How do you work in lockstep, and how does that look?
Ross Ronan (11:25)
It's funny, because whether it's outsourced compliance or an internal compliance program, we talk about this a lot in our podcasts and across all of our posts: a compliance executive must collaborate with all of the other departments. Whether you're outsourced or insourced, whatever you're doing, you have to be able to partner with them.
We had this question the other day. Someone said, "We really need your help in HR investigations and quality issues that come up, but it says that you don't do those." And what's my response to that? "We don't own it, but we partner with you every single time." I think that's really important to define, whether you're insourced or outsourced, because you have to have the right people to do that, and I think we do.
Devin Dalton (12:10)
I agree, and we are an extension of their workforce. We're not consultants. We are the compliance officer.
Ross Ronan (12:18)
And they call us. They call us when there's a problem. HR, I think we spend a lot of time on the phone with HR and quality, because they just want to talk to somebody, just like they would if they had an insourced compliance executive.
Devin Dalton (12:35)
I think that really highlights the full picture of what it looks like from beginning to end, starting with that risk assessment and Risk Assessment Plus+ that we discussed, potentially an outsource engagement, or support services as additional support to the compliance officer. So that wraps up the full picture of what that compliance function looks like.
Ross Ronan (12:55)
It really does wrap up our services menu of what we do. And if anybody out there needs compliance as a resource, we're here to help. We're going to be talking about how all of this really works, and when a leader does decide to move forward with a compliance program or an outsourced compliance program, what does that really mean?
What Outsourced Compliance Actually Means Day to Day
Ross Ronan (15:06)
What do you guys really do on a day-to-day basis? You talk a lot about compliance. What do you actually do?
Devin Dalton (15:13)
I feel like the biggest question we get is really, what does outsource mean, and how does that look for healthcare organizations if they're trying to outsource their compliance function?
Ross Ronan (15:23)
We do get that question quite a bit, along with the crazy looks when we go to conferences and tell them what we do, and they go, "I don't really understand what that means." The word outsource means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The way we define it is we are really a fractional compliance program for these healthcare organizations, but we're not necessarily just consultants. I would even say we're not consultants. We are an extension of the workforce. We come in, and we don't just do something, produce a product, give it to you, and walk away.
Now, with the risk assessment and Risk Assessment Plus+, we do come in, give you our product, and walk away. We give you the roadmap to go do something. But the outsource piece is really where we are an augmentation of that workforce. What's really important to understand is that when you have a compliance program, whether it's embedded or it's an outsourced company coming in, that person, that group, needs to understand the business, whether it's internal or external. A consultant doing the compliance work is not really going to have access, be embedded in the organization, provide that internal guidance, or sit down and take the time to learn the business. We spend a lot of time with the business and the business leaders understanding how it works and understanding what the pain points are. I think that's a really important factor that's a little bit different from some consulting groups.
When we started this, the idea was to not just do compliance. As an aside, our entire thesis was to provide a lot of fractional outsourced resources to a health organization, whether it was human resources, legal, quality, or compliance. That's why we started out with this idea, at least I did, of it being consultants. As we progressed, we really understood and determined that our specialty, how we work, and what we've honed in on was compliance. The need was so huge out there for the expertise in compliance, the expertise across specialties, and the ability to support a compliance program that already exists, whether we're setting one up or doing our support services. We felt like compliance was the biggest need out in the world, and we can let other people do all the other stuff.
Devin Dalton (18:20)
Absolutely. And to emphasize that point that we are that augmented function, I feel like the word consultant sometimes has a fear in leaders, where you're hiring a consultant, you're getting a report, or you're getting this bookshelf program that you stick on the shelf and walk away from. So can you speak to how we differentiate in that aspect, and what we provide so that that's not the case for leadership going forward?
Ross Ronan (18:48)
We hit all the good points there, just speaking on experience. We have this conversation a lot with people. Everybody's a little nervous when you hire a consultant. They feel like, "You're just coming in and taking my money, and you're going to leave me with a pamphlet, and then I have to go do a bunch of work on top of that, and you really don't have any dog in the hunt or any stakes in it." So when we change that to being your augmented compliance department, there's nothing we just create and put on the shelf and don't operate. We operationalize a compliance program to make it live and breathe.
One of the things I often tell clients when they think about either outsourcing their compliance program or getting a true consultant in to tell them what to do, not us but maybe somebody else, is they often see that as an investment in a very short-term thing. They say, "Okay, it's going to cost X amount of dollars for some other consultant to come in, or some fractionalized compliance officer. I'm going to do this for a year, take that hit for a year, and then move on." We have this conversation with a lot of CEOs and leaders to say, "Don't think about it as you're paying an outsourced group to do something." What do we often tell them? We always say that you're investing in your compliance program, and this should be a part of your company budget.
Compliance as a Strategic Investment and Competitive Advantage
Ross Ronan (20:38)
So what is one of the first things we do? You do all our proposals. You do all of our submission of information to potential clients. What's the number one thing we have before we even get to what services we offer?
Devin Dalton (20:49)
We really are looking at the strategic investment in your organization compared to different benchmarks throughout the United States with healthcare organizations.
Ross Ronan (20:58)
And their peers. We often look at the amount of revenue they generate, how many employees they have, and whether they're in multiple states. There's a lot of information out there that's really important. If I'm a healthcare organization that has $50 to $75 million in revenue, I've got 500 or 1,000 employees, and I'm in cardiology, or I'm in GI, what do my peers look like when it comes to investing in their compliance program, whether it's $150,000 or $250,000 a year?
At the end of the day, when we talk about the compliance advantage, why does the compliance advantage exist? You want to be competitive with your peers. Let's say you're bidding for a payer contract, or you're having some sort of agreement with a hospital system, and they look at you and go, "Well, this person has a compliance program. They've invested $100,000 in their program," or it could be a million, depending on how big you are. But this company didn't do it, and they're the exact same size. You've lost that competitive advantage. So when we talk about what's the first thing you should do and evaluate as a leader: put the money away. Set it and forget it. Whether you use it for an external fractional or to hire somebody, that's the number one way to make sure you're getting things done.
Devin Dalton (22:40)
I agree, and I think that's a big difference maker in our current client base: the executives for our current clients really look at that partnership and that strategic advantage. Like you said, this is the compliance advantage, and a lot of people look at compliance as a cost. I think that's a big difference in our current clients. They really value that partnership and that advantage we provide with that partnership and strategic investment.
Ross Ronan (23:08)
And when we talk about who this thing is built for, it's a good segue into our next section, how we do it and who it's built for. It is built for the people who understand what they have, understand what they need, who are going to put their money away, who are going to invest in compliance, who understand what their risk factors are, and who also understand where their competitive advantage lies.
Who It's Built For: The Client Profile and Risk Factors
Devin Dalton (23:23)
Okay, so I talked a little bit about our current client base. Could you talk about what profile of a potential client tends to be the strongest match?
Ross Ronan (23:33)
It's interesting, because there are a lot of different profiles out there. When we do that compliance investment like you were talking about a second ago, we really do try to say where your risk factors are and what your peers are doing. On every one of our BD phone calls, the first thing we do is start asking them: what are your pain points? What are you trying to solve? What's keeping you up at night? And how can we help you do that? We don't talk about our business. We don't talk about our experience. We don't talk about any of those things. They can look us up if they want to. They called us for a reason, and we're here to help them. We're not here to waste their time talking about us. I want to talk about them.
So we ask about payer mix, we ask about revenue, we ask about number of employees, we ask about how many states they're in, all the things that create a risk profile for a company. It's interesting, because we'll get calls, and the first thing I say is, "What's your payer mix?" They'll come back and tell you, "Well, we do 5% government payers and the rest commercial payers." My first response is, "Okay, then what's your revenue?" Then we back into what your exposure is, and I'll say, "Look, you don't necessarily need a fractional compliance program. You need a compliance program, but it could be smaller. It could be given to somebody else, and you can run it on a lower basis, because you don't really have a lot of government payers, and you're not at risk."
But when we get to this profile of a company that is generally $50, $75 million in revenue, plus they have 40%, 50%, 60% Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, that's a huge exposure. If you think 50% of your revenue is subject to False Claims Act violations, or things you can lose if they kick you out of the Medicare program, then $50 million goes down to 25. That's a really big hit. So the people who need either an outsourced compliance program or to really invest in their compliance program are the people who have the higher risks in that higher revenue and higher payer mix standpoint. I would say anywhere above 30% of your revenue is going to be affected by government payers, that is a time where you need to start really thinking about what your compliance program is.
Additionally, it's really important to understand how many employees you have. That is not definitive in and of itself, because you could have 100 employees and still make $50, $67 million, and you could have 1,000 employees and be underneath that. But the more employees you have, the more chances things can go wrong, because you've got a lot of people doing different things. You've got to educate them the right way. So that strong client comes in with that higher payer mix of government payers, and usually around the $50 million revenue standpoint is what we see.
Devin Dalton (26:36)
I think it's funny, this year we really dove into who our current client base is. I think we expected to see a lot of trends in our current client base, but we were really able to determine that all of our clients have the same sort of metrics. Like you said, they have the same payer mix risk level, or they have the same employee count and revenue. So I think it's really interesting when we tie all those back and determine who could be a good fit for us, and how they can really invest in their program.
Ross Ronan (27:07)
And thanks for all your work on the analysis of everything we do. It's really important to determine right up front that maybe they don't need us. Maybe this program is not built for them, on both ends. We have the big companies who come in with 10,000 employees, a billion dollars in revenue, and they're 60% Medicare reimbursed. I would look at them and go, "You need a full-time compliance program. You need to invest in a full-time compliance officer and full-time staff. That's a big program. You're going to have lots of different issues." On the same token, slower payer mix, lower revenue, fewer employees, I'll turn around and say, "Give that to your risk management or your human resources individual, and support them. Give them enough resources so they can take care of it. You don't need to make a huge investment. Here's your compliance investment, and it'll be this amount of dollars, but give it to somebody who can actually do it and who believes in it." And then there's that middle range. That's really that sweet spot for where we're at. We'll tell them right off the bat, you and I will get on the phone and say, "This is what I think you need about the business, but I want to do what's right for you. You need to go this way, or you need to go this way, but you don't need to be where we're at."
Devin Dalton (28:31)
And I think that's a big question we get all the time too: executives coming to us and saying, how do you know if you can support what we need? I think that ties into those metrics. We really determine what the current risk is, and whether we would be a good fit for them, or if, like you said, they need to go hire their own compliance executive.
Ross Ronan (28:49)
That's a really good point too. When we build this program, we build it to be scalable. We talk about how we build it and who it's built for. We build it to be scalable, and the first thing we do, to your point, we get that question all the time: how do I know whether or not I'm outgrowing you guys, or I need more hours? The first thing we say is, "We'll get in there, start building it, and we'll see." If you have a bunch of calls, a bunch of audits, a bunch of Unified Program Integrity Contractor reviews, a bunch of Targeted Probe and Educate reviews out there that we might not be able to handle on that fractional basis, then we'll stop. We'll go, "You need more help. You need to get somebody in here to run this program, because you're way above a fractional." On the converse side, if there's not a lot going on, that allows us to be a little bit more proactive, which we do all the time anyway, to bring those ideas to the table and say, these could be your risk factors. So we hit both ends of that spectrum. We really do feel like there's an opportunity for someone to understand what they need after we've gotten in there and built the program, and that's easier to do than just insourcing it from day one.
Devin Dalton (30:15)
Totally agree. I think, like you said, those are the biggest questions we get all the time when clients come to us and decide whether or not this is what they need. So I think it's important to distinguish how we determine what a potential client might be looking for or what they need.
The First 90 Days: Building the Program
Devin Dalton (30:28)
So we talked all through, if we determine that this client is a good fit and they agree that we provide what they might need on a fractionalized basis, what does that first 90 days really look like if they choose to engage with us?
Ross Ronan (30:43)
The first 90 days is imperative. We call it the 100-day plan. It's a little bit more than 90 days, but that first three months is really important. If we haven't already done a risk assessment, we start off with a risk assessment, because we don't know what we don't know. We've got to figure out what the gaps are and understand what those exposures are. Then we start building the major elements of that program, which always starts off with leadership for us.
Obviously, if we're an outsourced compliance executive, we are that person who's going to be responsible for the program. But it's imperative that the executive committee gets set up, and the board of directors committees get set up, because that's the ultimate leadership of a compliance program, and that's the number one thing that gets set up. Then we move on to the disclosure program, and auditing and monitoring, because those, in my opinion, are the windows to the soul of an organization. That's what really gets stood up in the first 90 to 100 days.
If you don't have a disclosure program, a helpline, a hotline, or a website portal, people in the organization are not telling you the red flags or the warning signs, and that's really important to see. It's not just a 1-800 number that goes to John sitting behind the desk. It's got to go to somebody who can talk to somebody and be anonymous, so they really feel comfortable. And then that auditing program, picking up rocks, we talk about it all the time. If you're not picking up rocks, you don't know what you can actually do. You don't know what your actual exposures are. Those aspects are the first 90 days where we really try to get that piece of the program up.
Devin Dalton (32:29)
And I think an important distinction when we really get started, which plays into my whole theme that we are an extension of the workforce, is that most of the time around day 60 to 90 I see leaders and other departments shift from saying "the compliance team" to "our compliance team." They really see us as that extension, especially when we start reporting to the board, like you said. In that first 30 days, we're getting those committees established, and they see that we are an extension of the organization. They really feel like we are getting their compliance function embedded in their organization. So it shifts to being that "our compliance team" mindset.
Ross Ronan (33:08)
You have the unique opportunity. You get to talk to all the clients and make sure they're comfortable with where they're at. And I agree with you, it's the first 60 days, 30, 60, 90 days, and I do think it changes, because people start to feel comfortable. They start to understand that they do have a compliance program, and they feel very comfortable with what's happening, and that's the shift in culture. As opposed to someone coming in and telling us what to do, it's "we have this, this is ours." And the greatest thing about it is when we leave, they still feel like they have that program up and running, because someone else is running it, but it's still the program they helped build. We just manage it. We help build it, but they help build it too. They own it. I think that's a really satisfying feeling for them. They do feel like they're protected.
Devin Dalton (34:00)
I agree. And it goes back, like I said, to that theme of us cooperating with the department heads. We're in lockstep with everyone, so it all flows into the same sort of mindset.
Ross Ronan (34:10)
It does. Well, that's what we do here, and this is what we do at Ronan, and this is who it's built for. We're going to be talking about what every CEO should know, the four assumptions that are worth thinking about, and what proactive leaders do to do things a little bit differently. If you've been wondering or needing some help on the compliance front, the next best thing is to start the conversation with us. So let us know if you have any questions. We're happy to be a resource.
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Devin Dalton is VP of Client Development at Marwood Group.
She leads business development strategy and client relationships, and she is on every one of the firm's business development calls, where the first question is always about the prospect's pain points, not the firm's pitch.
In this episode she and Ross Ronan break down how outsourced healthcare compliance works, how the firm qualifies a fit by revenue and government payer mix, and who the model is built for.
“We’re either outsourced or we’re support services. The outsource is really us coming in and running the program, standing it up, and being the compliance executive who can be a strategic partner to the CEO and the board.
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