How Aprio’s board portal helps health organizations with HRSA compliance

In a highly-regulated industry like healthcare, demonstrating compliance and security of your board activities is critical. A growing number of healthcare organizations including community-based health centers, colleges, universities and hospitals are adopting board portal software to meet their unique security and governance needs.

When evaluating board management software for health services, a key area to review is healthcare regulatory compliance. With almost 3,000 health centers in the US funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), here’s what to consider when assessing how board management software demonstrates HRSA compliance.

What’s involved in HRSA compliance?

As a HRSA-funded health center, you must meet the requirements as defined by the Health Center Program Compliance Manual. This includes program award recipients, sub-recipients, or look-alikes.

The HRSA presents an extensive list of board compliance requirements in the manual as well as board composition rules that can appear daunting at first glance. Use the manual as your road map to establish your governing board and its key functions and responsibilities such as:

Reviewing the overall performance of the health center
Selecting and evaluating the CEO/Project Director
Reviewing financial status including annual budget review and financial audits
Engaging in strategic and long-range planning of the health center
Developing or overseeing policies and processes such as how to resolve patient grievances
Evaluating board members

As a HRSA-funded health center, you must meet the requirements as defined by the HRSA compliance manual

How to demonstrate HRSA compliance with Aprio’s board portal

Maintaining accurate board records and streamlining compliance reporting are two key strategies you’ll need to demonstrate HRSA compliance. HRSA-funded health centers choose Aprio to keep board materials secure and report on compliance.

Here’s how Aprio helps boards demonstrate HRSA compliance:

1. Instant access to board document materials

Get instant access to all board materials including financial statements and reports, bylaws, policies, and archives within a highly reliable, secure portal. With Aprio, board members can access and search a centralized library for board agendas, minutes from past meetings, and review the next meeting board package.

2. Rapid compliance reporting

When it’s time to gather information for HRSA compliance reporting such as during your operating site visit, your board administration will save hours on reporting with these features:

Automatic archiving of meeting minutes, motions, financials, annual plans and board evaluations
Accurate audit trail of key compliance actions and dates
Rapid and robust search functionality to pull data needed for audits and compliance reports
Easy access to self-serve reports

3. Easy board evaluations

CEO and board evaluations are required by HRSA, but they also help ensure your board and leadership is functioning effectively. Aprio’s board portal makes CEO and board evaluations easy, secure, and efficient. With Aprio’s survey tool, you can easily:

Select which of your board members will participate in your survey
Enable anonymous responses (or not)
Send out the survey, as well as reminders to complete it, to your board members securely
Review summary and source data results in Aprio or export them to Excel for analysis
Re-run past surveys with the copy and repeat feature, helping you to compare data year over year
View trends over time by storing your surveys in Aprio

Need further guidance on running effective board evaluations? See our best practices.

4. Secure, private document storage

As your board oversees policies and processes such as responding to patient grievances, keeping health information and documents safe and secure is critical. Aprio’s board portal offers secure, private document storage as well as discussion and collaboration tools that keep data and dialogue away from email or other unsecured forms of communications.

Our strong data security and data privacy protection ensures we’re also HIPAA compliant. Your board can rest assured that individual health information and electronic health records are protected.

Maintain healthcare regulatory compliance with Aprio

If your healthcare organization needs to demonstrate healthcare regulatory compliance such as HRSA or HIPAA, Aprio has you covered.

Our board portal technology provides a direct ROI by making it easy to gather information for compliance reporting, keeps health information secure and ensures healthcare boards are productive. See how our easy-to-use software provides all the features your healthcare board needs with a custom demo.

“We knew there had to be technology to work smarter as a health agency. We chose Aprio because it makes a director’s job easier than any other technology. Aprio’s desktop and tablet editions build on what’s familiar to directors – easy to find agendas, latest versions of critical documents, contacts and archives – everything they expect all well organized and absolutely secure.” – Health agency executive

Want further information on how Aprio is the best value board portal for healthcare organizations? See these resources:

About the Author

Dee Sicklesteel, Director of Sales

Dee joined the Aprio team in 2009 and has match-made hundreds of boards to a best fit board portal. Her love for Aprio is largely due to the strong ROI and the positive ‘green’ benefits that the solution provides.