Margaret Hambleton (margaret@hambletoncompliance.com) is President of Hambleton Compliance LLC in Valencia, CA.

In the clinical environment, a review of systems (ROS) is an inventory of specific body systems reviewed by a physician to find potentially important clinical symptoms that the patient may have forgotten about, overlooked, or simply didn't mention. The ROS helps physician find the correct clinical diagnosis and develop appropriate treatment plans.

Similarly, compliance programs could benefit from a periodic ROS to help inform more detailed effectiveness evaluation and risk assessment. These ROS are designed only to point to areas that may need to be evaluated further, not determine whether specific problems exist. Below is an example of some of the elements a compliance ROS might include.