BP - Health Care Compliance Association

feature article
Meet Bill Parke
Vice President, Corporate Compliance, Rutherford Hospital
March 2009
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Editor’s note: This interview with Bill Parke
was conducted by Greg Warner, Director for
Compliance, Mayo Clinic and a member of the
HCCA Board of Directors. Greg may be reached
by telephone at 507/284-9029. Bill Parke may
be reached in North Carolina by telephone at
828/286-5360.
GW: I always find it interesting to learn
how others found their way into Compliance.
Would you share a little of your background
and how you ended up in Compliance?
BP: I came to the health care field later,
rather than sooner. I graduated with a degree
in Economics from SUNY Cortland and
spent several years trying my hand at a variety
of “opportunities” in other industries. At
the encouragement of a former professor, I
interviewed for a position in administration
at a small nursing home in rural Ohio. It was
there that I started what has proven to be a
very fulfilling career in health care administration.
After doing some coursework at Ohio
State University, I obtained my nursing home
administrator license and worked for several
years in the long-term care industry. Moving
to western North Carolina, I eventually
became the administrator of a hospital-based
nursing home run by Rutherford Hospital,
Inc. (RHI), a position I held for several years.
As often happens in smaller hospital
systems, you end up wearing more than one
hat and that was my experience; I ended up
being one of the corporate vice presidents
with additional operational responsibilities. In
1998, our then-CEO called me into his office
for a chat. He said that there was a new push
in the industry to establish something called
a compliance program. Our CFO had been
putting the program together, but now he had
been informed that having a CFO heading
up a compliance program was not going to be
viewed as “a good thing.” That’s when I was
asked to take over the task of getting a compliance
program up and running across the
various divisions of the hospital. He assured
me that this was a time-limited project—that
once the program was in place, it would pretty
much take care of itself. Ten years later, as the
Vice President of Corporate Compliance, I’m
still trying to figure out how to finish the job!
GW: Please describe the scope of your
compliance responsibilities and your
reporting process – both management and
programmatically.
BP: As Vice President of Corporate
Compliance, I have a dual reporting relationship
- as a member of senior management, I
report directly to our CEO and I also have
the authority to report directly to our Board
of Trustees. Along with my compliance
officer duties, I still have responsibilities over
a couple of support services departments. In
addition, I serve as our Privacy Officer and I
oversee our contract management program.
With the addition of a Compliance Assistant
last spring, our Compliance department
is now a two-person shop. It goes without
saying that I rely heavily on the efforts of the
Health Care Compliance Association • 888-580-8373 • www.hcca-info.org
other members of our senior management
team to make compliance work at RHI.
Having such a strong leadership team to
work with, a team that has truly taken the
compliance discipline to heart, has been an
amazing help to me. They carry a substantial
part of the responsibility for the day-to-day
maintenance of the compliance program, and
without their support and assistance, my job
would be impossible.
Early on, our senior management team
decided to emphasize the link between quality
issues and compliance, so we’ve had quality
elements as part of our annual Compliance
Work Plan for several years. That linkage was
carried over to our governing body as well.
The board formed a separate committee called
the Personnel, Compliance, and Quality
Committee (PCQ) to oversee those three
areas. This has proven to be one of the more