What Is Healthcare Risk Management?

And How Can It Help Me?

Risk Management helps reduce the uncertainty in your daily practice. An appropriate risk management program uses specific strategies and tools to manage and mitigate risk and exposure to unforeseen events. There are many risk reduction strategies that can be implemented, which will integrate seamlessly into your established practice protocol. A properly developed and implemented Risk Management program will help protect and grow revenue on both the top and bottom lines.

The end goal of a comprehensive health care risk management program is to advance safe and trusted patient-safety centered healthcare delivery by promoting proactive and innovative healthcare risk management techniques.

Some components of the Risk Management Program are:

• Identifying opportunities to improve patient safety.
• Performing a root cause analyses of identified issues as per the Quality Assurance Program.
• The development and annual review of facility specific policies/procedures.
• Providing annual training for staff.
• Conducting emergency drills
• Evaluating materials & equipment issues.
• Review contracts.
• Review & investigate incident reports.
• Analyze causes of claims.
• Interpret consent issues.

The framework for a risk management program include the following:

• Assessment
• Identification
• Remedies
• Plan
• Implementation
• Evaluation
• Assessment

Only through a comprehensive and objective review of your practice can areas of risk be identified. The assessment must include everything from how a patient is scheduled right through to check out of the patient from the facility/practice and every function that goes on in between.

Identification

After the potential risks have been assessed the risks need to be identified and ranked by their severity and potentiality of being adverse to your practice. This is where tracking and trending of occurrences is very important. Occurrence reporting is a tool by which risk is assessed by frequency. For example, for one specific treatment you are seeing a high rate of infections. In your overall practice the total infection rate may be relatively low and at an acceptable level. But the infection rate for that one specific procedure is very high and at what would be deemed an unacceptable level. Occurrence reporting would first clue you into the fact there could be a problem and second, through a thorough investigation, the root cause can be determined leading to policy and protocol changes that will reduce the infection rate and thereby reduce your risk of liability.

Remedies

Once risk is identified and assessed, potential remedies need to be discussed. This is where you lay out all the different ways the issue can be resolved and after assessing all the pro's and con's choosing what will work best for your practice.

Plan

After discussion and consideration to the remedies available to cure a risk a plan is developed.

Implementation

This is of course the crux of the whole process, implementing the changes required to reduce the facility's risk.

Evaluation

This is arguably the most important part of the risk management process. Did the plan do what it was supposed to do and if not why? Along this line a second question needs to be asked. Did the plan cause other unforeseen potential risk areas? If so the newly identified areas of risk should now undergo the same process to delineate the additional plan of correction.

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