EMQ FamiliesFirst – Saving Grace for California’s
Children and Families in Need
EMQ FamiliesFirst (www.emqff.org/about/index.shtml) is a Campbell, California-based nonprofit organization specializing in children’s behavioral health. Recognized for its innovative mental health treatment, foster care and social services, EMQ FamiliesFirst helps children and their families in crisis recover from trauma, abuse and addiction and rebuild their lives. Working with more than 20,000 children and their family members annually in more than 30 counties across California, the agency fights for sustainable change and advocates for improvements in the local, state and federal systems that serve children in need. EMQ FamiliesFirst is the largest provider of Wraparound services in the state, providing community-based, 360-degree support to help children stay in their homes, in their schools and out of trouble.
Connecting Compliance for a Widely Dispersed
Organization
Kathy McCarthy, chief legal counsel at EMQ FamiliesFirst, joined the organization in 2010. She soon began developing an enterprise-wide compliance program, one that would be standardized from an agency level but customizable by region when needed. Her end goal was to integrate governance, risk and compliance with a view toward assuring that the organization had accountability, transparency and access.
“We must comply
with thousands of
regulations and conduct
business in scores of
counties across the
state of California. As
an organization that is
widely dispersed and
highly regulated, finding
a platform to centralize
and standardize
compliance efforts was
key”
Kathy McCarthy Chief Legal Counsel EMQ FamiliesFirst
www.saiglobal.com/compliance
This vision presented many challenges because most of EMQ FamiliesFirst’s services are delivered in the community. With the exception of residential children (which number less than 100), the organization’s staff is in the community, working with children and families across the entire state of California. It was imperative that EMQ FamiliesFirst establish a central place to monitor compliance, ensure audit-readiness with Medi-Cal and other state and federal regulatory agencies, provide the corporate office with a view into regional activities, and allow regional directors visibility into peer and corporate work.
“We must comply with thousands of regulations and conduct business in scores of counties across the state of California. As an organization that is widely dispersed and highly regulated, finding a platform to centralize and standardize compliance efforts was key,” McCarthy said.
A Platform for Both Standardization and Customization
After a thorough review of vendor options, McCarthy and her team chose SAI Global’s Compliance 360® GRC Software Suite. The cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering helps organizations bring order and efficiency to complex compliance processes, enabling them to stay in compliance and minimize risk.
McCarthy realized she could use Compliance 360 to
standardize the compliance process and identify redundancies and gaps – making the program more efficient and getting everyone in the organization on the same page. The platform would also allow for the five regional hubs to customize some practices, while staying true to the organization’s high-level compliance standard.
“There is a sophistication to the Compliance 360 product that was really important to me. In any agency, there is always going to be appropriate tension between corporate standardization and regional customization. At EMQ FamiliesFirst, we need to have a system that can strike the proper balance. While centralizing compliance on a single platform was our priority, there were still regional requirements that needed to be imposed. Compliance 360 was the best solution that would allow us that flexibility,” McCarthy said. Another appealing feature of Compliance 360 is its
connections to external publishers of legal and regulatory content. The interface helps EMQ FamiliesFirst to better keep up with the most current regulations and ensure that all critical compliance documents are linked together with county contracts, policies and supporting evidence. The feature also enhances the knowledgebase of the staff. When employees ask about why something has to be done a certain way, McCarthy can visually show them the statutes or regulations where the requirements come from.
“There is a sophistication to
the Compliance 360 product
that was really important
to me. In any agency,
there is always going to be
appropriate tension between
corporate standardization
and regional customization.
At EMQ FamiliesFirst, we
need to have a system
that can strike the proper
balance. Compliance 360
was the best solution
that would allow us that
flexibility”
Benefits Across the Board – and for the Board
McCarthy and her team have been working with SAI Global to implement, test and run the Compliance 360 platform for several months. She demonstrated the program to the board of directors in June and the official “go live” was July 1, 2012, at the beginning of its fiscal year. In the short time that EMQ FamiliesFirst has been using the platform, it has already experienced invaluable benefits, including:
• Centralized, Current Contracts: With Compliance 360, EMQ FamiliesFirst will have its hundreds of contracts in one location and confidence in knowing that all the contracts on the system are current, easily accessible, accurate and usable. The organization has loaded 100 percent of its service contracts into the system, broken down by paragraph and with an assessment for each attached.
• Filling in the Gaps: One of EMQ FamiliesFirst’s philosophies is continuous quality improvement and Compliance 360 is being used to support its improvement initiatives. With the platform, the compliance team can find gaps in the compliance program and better organize and prioritize gap analyses so the quality team can more efficiently tackle them. The Agency was able to move from a reactive style of finding and fixing gaps to proactively dealing with them quickly and efficiently.
• Board Visibility and Confidence: Compliance 360 provides assurance to the board of directors that EMQ
FamiliesFirst is compliant and that there are no high-risk, high-incident gaps in the system. As a Council of Accreditation (COA) organization, McCarthy and her team have demonstrated to the board how they uploaded the COA guidelines and can prove exactly how the agency is abiding by them. The team is looking forward to the next accreditation review cycle because all of the relevant information is already in the system.
• Audit Ready, All the Time: EMQ FamiliesFirst plans to grant state and federal auditors direct access to the Compliance 360 system through the Surveyor View feature of the Virtual Evidence Room®. With such a level of transparency and openness,
auditors will have a high degree of confidence that EMQ FamiliesFirst has access to its own documents, understands what the auditors require, continually assesses its performance and ensures accountability by assigning business owners for everything that has to do with compliance.
“One of my favorite features
of the solution is having
visibility into the things we
need to work on. We have
a handle on what we need
to do to bring ourselves into
compliance with all of our
contracts, which is a huge,
measurable outcome”
www.saiglobal.com/compliance
• Proactive Contract Negotiations: With a complete snapshot of contract operations across the state, EMQ FamiliesFirst is in a better position to be a proactive contract negotiator instead of just accepting terms “as is.” The organization now has the opportunity to influence contracts and offer alternative ways to measure outcomes because it has a more complete view of what’s being done in other domains.
Building on Current Success
EMQ FamiliesFirst plans to expand its use of Compliance 360 moving forward. In FY13, it will incorporate the Request for Proposal (RFP) process into the system, reducing the time that it takes to complete RFPs and ensuring that the information it submits is current and consistent across the agency. McCarthy is also planning to employ incident reporting and management and departmental audits with the platform as well.
“It’s much easier now to go
to a county, for instance,
and say, ‘We have surveyed
our operations throughout
the state and the process
is being done successfully
another way in other
counties; let’s discuss an
alternative.’ Compliance 360
creates efficiencies just by
virtue of the fact that we can
pinpoint exactly what we
are doing anywhere in the
organization”
© 2012 SAI Global Ltd. The SAI Global name and logo and Cintellate name are trademarks of SAI Global Ltd.
About SAI Global Compliance
SAI Global Compliance is the world leader in providing organizations with a wide range of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) products, services and technology that help build organizational integrity and effectively manage compliance risk. Our global staff includes professionals and subject matter specialists in advisory services; program design, management and implementation; instructional de-sign; and software development. Our focus is to help establish and enhance compliance effectiveness. With well over a thousand organizations as clients and tens of millions of satisfied users around the world, we work with clients to integrate a flexible suite of solutions and services specifically tailored for a business and industry. Our products include the world’s largest library of compliance and ethics learning, Code of Conduct advisory services and training, and the Compliance 360® GRC Software
Suite to manage compliance, policy, incident and audit management. Our Cintellate™ EH&S Software addresses key issues in operational environmental health and safety management. For more informa-tion, please call us at the full service location nearest you or visit www.saiglobal.com/compliance
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