Insights
The Problem With Looming Audits
It's not a matter of if you'll get audited, but a matter of when. The problem lies at the very beginning: vendors lack proper tooling to organize compliance efforts.
By Dominic CischkeFebruary 2, 20262 min read
"It's not a matter of if you'll get audited, but a matter of when."
That's what I was told by my industry-veteran superiors upon moving into healthcare. The threat of an audit sits above every vendor's head, looming in the shadows.
But in the day-to-day shuffle, priorities shift and compliance drift happens.
After speaking with dozens of vendors, unfortunately, futuristic audits become second-hand considerations to problems they need to solve today. And nowadays, each day brings new emergencies, pushing compliance off further until it becomes effectively forgotten.
Exclusion lists get kicked down the road. Security standards don't get tested or updated. Liability coverage policies lapse. FAR clauses become forgotten. Vendors stop ensuring subcontractors meet their contract-mandated requirements. SLAs become guidelines. We've seen all of these and more.
The Ineffective Audit Hammer
It might take months or years for the audit hammer to finally swing down, but eventually the vendor's neglected compliance will become the emergency of the day. Vendors scramble to document policies and processes that never existed. Both parties spend countless hours going back and forth on document requests and reviews.
In the end, the vendor, their health plan/system partner, and the members/patients all got exposed to enormous risk. And in six months, the vendor will be right back to their noncompliant ways.
The problem lies at the very beginning: vendors lack proper tooling to organize compliance efforts, so they eventually wind up in noncompliance no matter what. The only way to ensure consistent enterprise-grade vendor compliance is to give vendors the tools to achieve it on their end.
A New Standard For Vendor Oversight
Harper brings this to reality with a purpose-built compliance environment that directly integrates into your vendor's operations.
Here, all compliance obligations originally stuck in static contract PDFs exist as trackable, assignable tasks where real-time evidence is collected. Reminders are automatically surfaced to relevant task owners, keeping compliance top of mind and on track.
This data shows vendor (non)compliance across their entire span of obligations, immediately visible to the customer health plan/system. Real-time, complete compliance data on your entire vendor network in one location, so your team can act where needed.
Stop chasing vendors. Skip right to the skilled work your team excels at.
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Frequently asked questions
- Why do vendors fall out of compliance before an audit?
- Because compliance is treated as a future problem. Without dedicated tooling, vendors let obligations like exclusion-list checks, security testing, and insurance renewals lapse under day-to-day pressure, and the gaps only surface when an audit forces them to.
- How can health plans catch vendor noncompliance earlier?
- By replacing static contract PDFs with continuously tracked obligations. When each requirement is a monitored task with real-time evidence, plans see noncompliance as it happens instead of discovering it during an audit months or years later.