The Tricky Task of Researching Healthcare Compliance

If you’re working on a certificate from C|M|LAW’s Center for Health Law & Policy or otherwise involved in healthcare law, chances are you’ll have to do some research into healthcare compliance. This can be trickier than you might think, because healthcare compliance means different things to different people.

If you look up healthcare compliance on Wikipedia, you’ll see that the term refers to the degree to which a patient correctly follows health advice. For example, there can be a healthcare compliance issue as to whether a diabetes patient correctly monitors her blood sugar levels.

But that’s probably not the type of healthcare compliance you’re researching. Healthcare compliance in the legal field generally looks at how health law and policy statutes, regulations, and cases are followed, and examines fraud and abuse.

Separating your research results so that you only get relevant results in the legal healthcare compliance area can be tricky. To get better results, you can try a keyword search for law AND health AND compliance. You can also try terms like “Medicare fraud,” “Medicaid fraud” or “health care fraud”.

Our Center for Health Law and Policy Guide gives you more research ideas and points you toward specific resources on healthcare compliance.