Article Highlights
- The problem: Trouble aligning policies with accreditation standards
- The solution: PowerStandards, document compliance management software
- The benefits: Prepare for accreditation, save time and money, and mitigate risk
The problem: Aligning policies with standards of accreditation
Your emergency communications center relies upon numerous policies and standard operating procedures to ensure efficient and effective operations for your community. But if your policies aren’t in direct alignment with an accreditor’s standards, you may face challenges attaining well-deserved recognition. Without efficient policy management processes in place, your agency lacks a systematic way to match each of its policies with an associated standard of accreditation. This not only makes the whole process more time-consuming – it also means you can’t determine if you have gaps in compliance that will prevent you from achieving accreditation.
To add to this complication, your ECC’s limited resources mean that staff struggle to ensure all documents are updated and reviewed when a standard changes (if they’re aware it even changed in the first place). When you do make changes, you have trouble enforcing compliance agency-wide since you don’t have a straightforward way to update staff about new versions of a policy or SOP.
All of these inefficient processes introduce liability risks to your agency and make it difficult to prove ECC compliance so you can attain accreditation. The worst part? Failing to maintain compliance harms the quality of service that your telecommunicators provide to the community, making it even more difficult to achieve accreditation.
The solution: Compliance management software
PowerStandards by PowerDMS is a compliance document management system that helps your agency meet all standards of accreditation. The emergency call center software enables your agency to efficiently match policies with accreditation standards. PowerDMS partners with more than 60 accrediting bodies to give you easy access to regularly-maintained and updated standards manuals. If you pursue accreditation through a non-partner organization, PowerStandards can also convert most standards manuals for use in the system.
These standards manuals mean you can readily identify whether your policies meet accreditation requirements. PowerStandards offers two tools in particular that make it easy to accomplish this:
- Policy-to-standards mapping: Enables your ECC to upload and link your policies, procedures, or other proof of compliance (like documents or videos) to specific standards.
- Digital highlighting: Makes it possible to call out specific areas of a proof-of-compliance document to emphasize how it meets ECC requirements.
As standards change, you can continue maintaining ECC compliance by receiving automated alerts and completing any required to-do items. This is made possible through task management tools that enable you to assign both one-time and recurring tasks, so employees know exactly when it’s time to review, update, or archive current policies. These notifications can be automated to specific users, groups, or the entire agency.
The best part is that this accreditation management solution doesn’t require any additional resources from your agency. PowerDMS provides users with high-quality customer service and implementation teams to help install this easy-to-use emergency communications center software. From there, it’s as straightforward as uploading compliance documents to the system.
The benefits of emergency communications center software
PowerStandards provides a streamlined way to meet all your ECC compliance requirements. Using this software, your agency can confidently prepare for your next accreditation assessment.
This cloud-based software also allows staff to update policies four times faster and save money on paper costs, freeing up resources for more important work. All of this means you can feel peace of mind knowing that you’re not only keeping employees informed about the most up-to-date policies, but also mitigating compliance risks and enforcing accountability in your agency.
Learn more
Schedule a no-obligation demo today to learn more about why PowerStandards is the best compliance document management system for your ECC.