Traveling a full circle in her career, and perhaps venturing out from many directions from the center, Pat Schaumann has used her background in education to become arguably the meetings industry leader on the topic of healthcare compliance.
From her start as a teacher at the Missouri School for the Blind, Schaumann went back to school as a student to study tourism and marketing, leading to a job at a meeting management company, starting her own destination and events management company (MAC Meetings & Events), working for the largest DMC in the world, Swiss-based Kuoni Travel.
But the labyrinthine world of medical meetings compliance, as stress-inducing as it may be, has turned out to be her calling, leading her to start the International Medical Meeting Professionals Association in 2009.
“I saw then in 2009 what was beginning to happen with medical meetings and what was on the horizon,” Schaumann said, referencing the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, a part of the Affordable Care Act that seeks to bring transparency to financial transactions in the medical and pharmaceutical industries, including meetings. “It was going to change our world completely. This was how we were going to be governed, by laws and penalties.”
She used her expertise to pen Breaking the Code to Healthcare Compliance, now in its third edition. After leading the drive for Saint Louis University’s Healthcare Meeting Compliance Certificate (HSMCC), which was absorbed by MPI (where she headed up the Healthcare Sector of MPI Academy), Schaumann joined Maritz, a company which takes compliance to heart, as its Senior Director, Healthcare Compliance.
“Maritz has made a commitment to, number-one, internal education,” Schaumann said. “Everyone who touches healthcare at Maritz must have the HSMCC, including the president, tax department and finance department. The commitment internally is that we’re going to do this, do it the right way, have integrity in the program, and what we do is accurate.”
And because healthcare compliance laws and policies change dramatically from nation to nation, state to state and even company to company, you may say she enjoys a certain amount of “job security” educating on the subject.
“I think if you were to ask me, ‘Is there any standardization on the horizon?’ I’m going to say no--there’s no standardization, no consistency and no predictability worldwide. I don’t see us coming together globally on this topic for a while unless somebody spearheads it.”
