Your Mileage May Vary

With a nod to Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, we can learn a lot about how to run your compliance program at peak effectiveness by viewing your home care company as a beloved motorcycle. Maybe it's your old dependable warhorse. Maybe it's a state-of-the-art machine, magnificent in its high-tech glory. Perhaps your goal is to ride it hard and fast, or long and steady. The analogy works well.

What does it take to get the most from your home care company, or from your motorcycle? The ROPE system shows us that the answers are similar.

Rung 1 of our ROPE Ladder focuses on identifying and assessing the way you actually run your home care company and fine-tuning these operations conform both to best practices and to various laws, regulations and other “rules.”

With our motorcycle analogy, this represents your bike's initial factory inspection, perhaps combined with 20,000/40,000 mile major inspections. Are the parts working well? Do the internal operations at acceptable efficiency? Are the engine idle speed, oil level, tire pressure, etc. at optimum levels? Does everything conform to government and manufacturer requirements (the “rules”)?

For you to get maximum effectiveness from your motorcycle, it must be objectively evaluated and fine-tuned in order to deliver it to you at factory standards. Similarly, within your home care company, Rung 1 of the ROPE Ladder tells us that your compliance program's effectiveness requires you first to understand how your company actually runs, and to fine-tune it as necessary for maximum efficiency and effectiveness, compliant with the rules.

Rung 2 of our ROPE Ladder focuses on education and training. This correlates to your driving lessons. You now have a carefully inspected motorcycle, but how do you ride it?

It is a shame merely to fumble with the ignition and then putter down the street, ignorant of your bike's extra features, options, weaknesses and capabilities. For maximum effectiveness as a biker, you should know how to get the most from your machine.

Perhaps it's not necessary to understand the bike's schematics, just as the ROPE system teaches us that it's more important to know what to do than all the details of why you should do it that way. Regardless, even if you don't fully know why, you must know how to run your bike at optimum performance.