A Surprising Venn Diagram: Compliance and Public Health

When I embarked on the next chapter of my career by enrolling in a graduate program for my masters in public health, I naively thought my undergraduate degree in chemical engineering would have more overlap and relativity to the subject than my nearly two decades as a compliance attorney. That shortsightedness was in direct defiance to the fact I spent the majority of my legal career working in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. What I quickly realized, however, is that there is a surprising amount of overlap between my two chosen career paths. And, the overlap is not necessarily in the subject matter (unless, of course, you find yourself like I did supporting compliance within the healthcare industry) but rather in the administration and execution of both. There are three notable ways in which the fields intersect.

1. Data

One could make the argument that data is important to any field; however, when addressing population health or instilling an ethical and compliant corporate culture, data is not just important but imperative. 

By its very definition, public health is focused on the health of a population. Thus, public health professionals rely on data to track the burden of disease, identify appropriate intervention targets, and measure the impact - or success (or, unfortunately, failure) - of those interventions. For example, surveillance data about communicable diseases can easily reflect an outbreak and the need for targeted prevention measures.

Similarly, compliance professionals rely on data to identify instances of risk, where preventative policy or procedure measures might be helpful, or noncompliance, in which remediation steps such as retraining or disciplinary action may be required. The import of data is reinforced by the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice considers the extent to which a company has access to and uses data one of the elements of an effective compliance program.

2. Culturally Competent Communication

Culturally competent communication is the ability to effectively communicate and interact with individuals across different backgrounds, including cultural, political, and moral spheres. In other words, culturally competent communication is communicating in a way that meets your target population where they are.

In public health, communicating with cultural competence can make or break the success of an intervention. An extensive anti-substance abuse program targeting middle school students, many of whom are multi-language learners, will fall flat if all communications are laden heavily with dense medical jargon that reads at a twelfth grade level and is not translated into the prevalent languages used by that target population and their families. 

A multinational corporation’s code of conduct will similarly fail to resonate if not translated into languages spoken by its employees worldwide and use scenarios or colloquial terms understood only by those at headquarters. 

For both public health and compliance professionals, it is worth the time invested to consider your target audience, including whether accommodations are necessary, translations needed, or alternate examples explored.

3. Influencing Behavior

Finally, one of the most poignant parallels between public health and compliance is that, most often, both disciplines are ultimately focused on influencing behavior. In other words, it is the outcome versus the output that moves the needle. 

While the number and length of training sessions or communications in both is important, it is the impact of those training sessions or communications that matter most in the public health and compliance worlds. For example, it may be relevant to track the number of hand washing posters hung in a public restroom; however, what matters more in preventing the spread of communicable disease is the percentage of individuals who actually wash their hands. Similarly, from a government oversight perspective, there is value to a company having simply communicated or trained its employees about the pitfalls of bribery; however, what may affect the outcome of a government investigation is the instances in which employees falsified expense reports, submitted sham receipts, or made improper books and records entries.

There are likely a multitude of other ways in which the two fields are interrelated; however, these factors stood out as they are often core to critical processes in both. Additionally, while one, if not all three, of these factors may apply to other industries or sectors, the near overlap of these three factors between these two professional areas was notable.