Key Takeaways
- In 2022 an average of 1.94 healthcare data breaches of 500 or more medical records were reported every day. A rigid risk management strategy in healthcare prevents data breaches and improves response time to counter these issues.
- Education and training of healthcare staff help to increase risk awareness within a medical organization. Effective training establishes a risk-based approach and empowers staff to proactively signal higher officials during adverse situations.
- A reporting culture ensures that the same information is shared between the senior management and the staff members. Reporting system promotes cross-functional cooperation across departments and helps to manage risks efficiently.
The healthcare industry is continuously surrounded by challenges such as patient safety, compliance, and cybersecurity. Healthcare organizations have to grapple with these challenges while staying on par with technological innovations.
It’s essential to keep up with the increasing risks displayed by emerging technologies. According to a survey, customer engagement is the top risk at healthcare organizations, followed by cybersecurity and the transition to value-based care. CFOs and risk managers are investing in risk management strategies to counter emerging concerns in the healthcare sector. Let’s look at these in detail.
Purpose of Risk Management in Healthcare
The sole purpose of risk management in healthcare is to ensure data security. It’s necessary to safeguard patient information or ePHI (Protected Health Information) as it contains personal details, medical history, and other information. Failure to protect it can harm a patient’s reputation, cause identification fraud, and more.
According to Hipaajournal.com, in 2022 an average of 1.94 healthcare data breaches of 500 or more medical records were reported every day. A rigid risk management strategy for healthcare software development prevents data breaches and improves response time to counter these issues.
Furthermore, risk management strategies in healthcare help to plan for any adverse events such as natural or man-made disasters. It helps to accurately respond, report, and resolve any type of risks in healthcare.
10 Risk Management Strategies in Healthcare
1. Education and Training
Education and training of healthcare staff help to increase risk awareness within a medical organization. A better understanding of critical situations and the risks involved in them makes staff more aware. They begin to look at things differently and start recognizing potential hazards.
Effective training establishes a risk-based approach and empowers staff to proactively signal higher officials during adverse situations. Additionally, the staff is more likely to feel engaged and empowered to speak up on the risk management process. Every training program is approved by the managers, hence their support is crucial.
2. Risk Identification and Prioritization
The healthcare sector faces new risks each day and it’s challenging for risk managers to identify all of them. But, staff education, industry knowledge, and data analysis help to uncover potential healthcare risks.
Once all threats have been identified, managers can go about prioritizing them. The idea is to rank from low to high risk. For this purpose, a risk management matrix plays a vital role. It provides insights into organizations’ risks and their overall seriousness and probability. Typically all risks are classified as tolerable risk, low risk, medium risk, high risk, and intolerable risk.
3. Risk Assessment and Monitoring
Risk assessment involves understanding areas of failure and building best practices to minimize them. Consider establishing a framework for risk assessment which is reviewed after a fixed timeframe and make action plans that are executed to counter impending risks.
Continuous assessments, reviews, reporting, and audits provide insights on how to eliminate healthcare risks. Once threats are assessed, take key steps to monitor them. These include:
- Monitoring risk response plans.
- Identifying trigger conditions.
- Analyzing new risks.
- Evaluating the effectiveness of risk management plans.
4. Patient Grievances
Patient satisfaction is of prime importance. Dissatisfaction leads to medical malpractice litigation, hence consider including procedures for responding to patients’ and family grievances in the risk management strategy for healthcare.
Recommended actions to address patient grievances include:
- Create a process to record all complaints.
- Ensure involvement of organizing bodies or grievance committees.
- Incorporate policies and processes for the resolution of complaints.
- Train and educate staff to listen effectively and solve grievances.
- Track complaints and scrutinize patient satisfaction to improve healthcare.
5. Streamlined Reporting Culture
A reporting culture ensures that the same information is shared between the senior management and the staff members. Reporting system promotes cross-functional cooperation across departments and helps to manage risks efficiently.
Further, automated reporting increases risk response time. The absence of a functional reporting system makes it difficult to have a clear sense of direction. Often it impacts the risk management process as well. Hence, a streamlined reporting culture allows managers to make decisions based on reliable data.
Apart from this, compliance reporting mandates reporting of medication errors, sentinel events, and medical device malfunctions to oversight bodies.
6. Maintain Transparency
Transparency goes hand-in-hand with the reporting culture and system. Risk management must have a clear knowledge of individual risk exposures, so they can offer useful information to both internal and external stakeholders.
Further, healthcare providers should maintain complete transparency with patients regarding their medical conditions and ePHI. Thereby, building trust with them. Transparency prevents biases within departments, seniors, and colleagues. Thus, avoiding any unnecessary collisions between them.
7. Robust Communication Plans
Effective communication plans are essential to implement and resolve healthcare risks swiftly. Ensure that staff is aware of the basic concepts of safety and don’t assume that everyone is on the same page. Explain concepts to avoid confusion. Inform team members and staff about the nature of risk management strategies in healthcare and why it’s important.
One of the key goals of communication is to provide accurate, relevant, clear, meaningful, and understandable terms for better risk management. Handling risk isn’t a one-person job. It is impossible to manage risks in healthcare without a robust communication channel with every department.
8. Incorporate Evolving Industry Protocols
The rules of the healthcare industry are ever-changing, based on new procedures, technologies, and medicine. Different rules are being created at federal, state, and local levels for healthcare. Include directives from governing bodies such as the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure compliance.
Regularly update and review policies to anticipate risks and not miss out on vital rules. Failure to maintain compliance often results in fines and criminal charges. Train staff on updated policies, so everyone is on the same page.
9. Create a Contingency Plan
If the management team is aware of an incident ahead of time, then they can respond to the circumstances faster, thus minimizing downtime. Quick responses protect equipment, healthcare software, and data from harm. Some disasters are life-threatening and having a contingency plan in place helps to mitigate dangerous scenarios and take action.
Furthermore, contingency plans reduce response time, thereby giving staff the data they need to recover from an incident. A contingency plan helps the management to take essential decisions in the heat of the moment to minimize damages.
10. Response and Mitigation
Risk response and mitigation are put in place to decrease the probability of threats and their impact. Together they make up the risk-planning process. Once all the risks have been identified, response and mitigation come into the picture.
It helps to set up a strategy for each risk. It could be either to avoid, transfer, mitigate, or accept risks. Each of these strategies is subject to cost/benefit analysis.
Arkenea is a healthcare software development company and with over 12 years of experience in the industry, it has provided cutting-edge software solutions to its clients. If you’re also looking for healthcare software for your organization, then just get in touch with Arkenea.