Risk and Compliance in Human Care Licensing and Potential Applicability to Other Industries
I have posted a number of times on this platform about risk assessment and regulatory compliance. I thought it was time to look at some general trends that I have discovered in my regulatory science research and see if there is applicability to other industries. My research has focused on human care licensing and possibly many of my discoveries may only apply to this one area but you never know until you ask others about their respective industries. Could it apply or not?
So, here we go, let’s see if any of these resonate for other industries!
The first area has to do with regulatory compliance data distributions. This is generally dealt with via a Regulatory Compliance Gravity Curve (see my Juned 23, 2026 post on this concept) which I have devised and what I have found is interesting. There is usually always high compliance with high risk rules but low compliance with low risk rules. Mid compliance is found with mid level risk rules which also appear to be good discriminators between overall compliance, the high compliant group vs the low compliant group.
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The second area also deals with regulatory compliance data distributions. Regulatory compliance data are skewed generally and not normally distributed as you would find with other program quality tools. Licensing researchers and regulatory scientists have difficulty distinguishing between high compliance and middle compliance in terms of quality and which are really the better programs. This finding has led us to the theory of regulatory compliance which I have written a good deal about on this platform. The theory introduces substantial regulatory compliance and the concept of a ceiling or diminishing returns effect when comparing regulatory compliance and program quality. Also, dichotomization of data comes into play in helping to distinguish between high compliant groups and low compliant groups.
The third area deals with the concept of risk assessment. Risk assessment in the human care licensing arena is relative and not absolute. There are different levels of risk and we need to take this into account. In other industries this may not be the case, such as nuclear power plants where all rules are created equally at high risk. In the human care licensing field that is not the case, at least 3 levels exist: High, Medium, and Low Risk Levels.
These are just three areas that generally deal with risk assessment and regulatory compliance in the human care licensing industry. I will be interested in hearing from other industries if these three areas resonate for your industry or are they just peculiar to the human care licensing industry.
