Compliance is an operating discipline that shapes culture, decision making, and long term resilience. When applied well, it influences how organizations hire, scale, manage risk, and respond under pressure. While healthcare offers one of the clearest examples of how deeply compliance influences outcomes, the same principles increasingly shape performance, accountability, and risk management across highly regulated and fast growing industries.
“Compliance in law enforcement could be the difference between life or death,” says Chris Mashburn, COO at Jorie Healthcare Partners, a healthcare services and technology firm that helps provider organizations manage operations, financial performance, and compliance across complex clinical environments. “In my experience, it was the difference between employees being prepared for what could happen versus not being prepared.
For Mashburn, whose career spans law enforcement, security, healthcare operations, compliance is better framed as a leadership posture rather than a regulatory checklist. “Compliance should be thought about every day and in everything you do.”
Compliance As An Operating Principle
While working in law enforcement as a Captain in the Texas Highway Patrol, strict adherence to policy is what keeps teams organized, coordinated, and capable of protecting the public under pressure. That experience created a lasting belief that compliance is inseparable from operational excellence.
When Mashburn transitioned into healthcare, he recognized familiar patterns. Healthcare, like security, operates in high risk environments with complex workflows and narrow margins for error. “Everything we do should have a compliance mindset to it,” he says. “Healthcare is strictly about compliance.” Rather than viewing regulations as constraints, Mashburn prefers to see them as guardrails that allow organizations to scale safely and sustainably.
This perspective challenges a common misconception that compliance slows organizations down. In Mashburn’s view, the opposite is true when it is applied correctly. Compliance becomes a stabilizing force that supports growth instead of reacting to it.
Making Compliance Scalable Instead Of Burdensome
Despite healthcare being one of the most heavily regulated industries in the United States, many organizations struggle with the same structural flaw. “There’s only a few people within the organization that are truly focused on compliance,” he says. That creates blind spots, and compliance fails to influence daily decisions across operations, technology, and partnerships.
“It’s always been the responsibility of a few instead of being a responsibility of everyone, starting at the very top,” he says. Without visible commitment from executives, compliance initiatives struggle to gain traction throughout the organization.
The difference between a scalable compliance system and a burdensome one, according to Mashburn, comes down to mindset. When leadership consistently evaluates policies, processes, and growth strategies through a compliance lens, it becomes part of how the business operates rather than an obstacle to overcome.
“If your top leaders are thinking continually about compliance, it’s very scalable,” Mashburn says. It’s a forward looking approach that forces organizations to address risks early, before they become costly problems. It also strengthens operational discipline, since teams are already considering downstream impacts as they grow. By identifying issues ahead of time, organizations avoid reactive fixes that drain resources and slow momentum.
Lessons For Non Healthcare Industries
Other industries can benefit from studying healthcare compliance precisely because of its complexity. Healthcare operations involve intricate process flows, overlapping regulations, and constant scrutiny. Learning how compliance functions within that environment offers a blueprint for other sectors.
“If you can figure out and follow healthcare compliance, you probably can just about be compliant with any industry within the U.S. marketplace,” he says. The key is understanding the operational reality behind the rules. Non healthcare organizations must first study how healthcare actually works before attempting to apply its compliance principles.
Leadership Sets The Standard
Meaningful improvement starts with collective agreement at the top. Leadership teams must align on compliance as a priority and reinforce it consistently through decisions, investments, and behavior.
“Sometimes as leaders, we push compliance to the back because until you need it, you really don’t want to do it,” he says. “But it’s that one time that you should have done it that you really needed it.” By bringing compliance teams into new processes, policies, and business relationships early, organizations strengthen their foundation before challenges arise.
Follow Chris Mashburn on LinkedIn or visit his website for more insights.
