Risk management is more than a necessity, it is a pillar of the safe, efficacious, and ethical practice of patient care in the ever-changing and highly unpredictable world of health care. Clinical error may be one risk factor, while a data breach may be another. Health care risks are of a heterogeneous nature and, therefore, very complex. The proper implementation of effective risk management not only guarantees the safety of patients but also guarantees operational viability and regulatory compliance. The purpose of this understanding is to provide healthcare professionals, administrators, and policymakers alike with the foundation for good risk management practice in health care.

The Definition of Risk Management in Healthcare

There is no one size fits all definition of risk management in healthcare because a risk in healthcare is defined as the likelihood of a particular threat triggering or exploiting a particular vulnerability, resulting in harm or damage to a patient, an organisation, or its workforce. (Abridged from the definition of risk in HHS’ Guidance on Risk Analysis).

Using this definition of risk, the “traditional” definition of risk management in healthcare is the identification, assessment, and minimisation of the organisation’s exposure to risks in order to improve patient care, reduce liability risks, and prevent financial losses. However, using this definition of risk can lead to the management of risks being conducted by separate business units in “risk silos”.

This can result in a lack of training, communication, coordination, and oversight which limits the effectiveness of risk management activities. Elevate your healthcare risk management skills with specialised training from London’s premier hub of training and consulting. To make risk management in healthcare more effective, there is a growing trend away from risk silos and towards organisation wide “enterprise” risk management in healthcare. 

Top Risk Management Strategies in Healthcare

Here are top 7 risk management strategies in healthcare:

1. Risk Assessment and Monitoring

Risk assessment involves understanding those areas of potential failure and designing best practices to limit them. The initial requirement is to put in place some kind of framework for risk assessment and to review it after a fixed period and, if necessary, prepare action plans to counter the impending risks.

Ongoing assessments, reviews, reports, and audits facilitate the identification and elimination of risks in health care. Once the threats are assessed, there are key steps involved in the monitoring process. These actions are:

1. Monitoring risk response plans,  
2. Identifying trigger conditions,  
3. Examining new risks, and  
4. Evaluating the risk management plan. 

2. Streamlined Reporting Culture

There is a certain flow of information between senior management and staff members. It is a reporting culture. The reporting system fosters cross-functional cooperation across departments to manage risks more efficiently.

In addition, automation enhances the speed of the risk response. A non-functional reporting system comprises the vision. Most often, this adversely affects the risk management process as well. Therefore, a streamlined reporting culture is imperative for the exploitation of management in making permanent decisions on credible data. 

And compliance reporting has its mandates, whereby the oversight bodies need to be informed about medication errors, sentinel events, and malfunctioning medical devices.

3. Maintain Transparency

Transparency, in fact, goes hand in hand with the culture and the reporting system. Risk management must know exactly what individual risk exposures exist so that a useful opinion can be offered both to internal stakeholders and to external parties. 

Further, healthcare providers should maintain complete transparency with patients regarding their medical conditions and ePHI, thereby building trust with them. Transparency eliminates bias within departments, seniors, and peers, therefore minimising unnecessary collisions among them.

4. Robust Communication Plans

They are effective in implementing and resolving problems quickly in healthcare settings. Hence not everyone shares the same consensus, they should make sure they are really aware of the core fundamentals of safety. Without assuming anything, explain confusing concepts to everyone. Communicate with the team and their staff in terms of what risk management strategies relate to in the healthcare setting and their importance.

This is where communication’s main target lies, above all, as a function of relaying acceptable, relevant, pure, meaningful words which need to be understandable in effective risk management. Certainly, risk is not the job of a single person. It is impossible to manage risks in healthcare without a strong communication channel with almost all departments.

5. Incorporate Updatable Industry Protocols 

The healthcare rules are changing with developing procedures, technologies, and medicines. New regulations are being drafted at federal, state, and local levels for healthcare. Never forget the guidelines of the governing bodies which incorporate the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Policies are regularly reviewed and updated to ensure anticipation of risks and vital regulations are not missed. There are serious fines and criminal charges for not keeping compliance. Staff should be trained on the new policy so that everyone has common knowledge about these policies. 

6. Education and Training

Education and training of the health staff to improve the risk awareness of health staff in a medical organisation. They begin to see things differently and start to identify probables.

But this is how training is equipped with a risk-based attitude, encouraging personnel to signal higher officials in cases that go wrong. Furthermore, the employees will be more likely to feel involved and empowered to speak out about the risk management process. Such training programmes place their stamp of approval from managers thus crucial.

7. Risk Priority and Identification 

The new risks faced daily by the healthcare system are almost countless, and managers are hard pressed to keep track of all of them. Staff education, information from the industry, and data analysis, however, can lead to a complete detection of potential risks in healthcare. 

Once the managers identify all threats, they can proceed with the management of priorities for them. The idea is to rank from low to high risk. It is here that the risk management matrix plays such an important role because it provides insights into the organisations’ risks as well as their overall seriousness and probability. Rates are typically classed as: tolerable risk, low risk, medium risk, high risk and intolerable risk.

Why Risk Management is Important to Healthcare Facilities

Risk management is important to healthcare facilities because of the many operational areas where threats and opportunities may exist for a healthcare organisation. Inadequately exploiting vulnerabilities while adequately exploiting opportunities becomes an exercise in futility when approached partially. An integrated approach to risk management will assure the fewest inconsistencies in risk management methodologies, which in turn relates the analysis and control of risks under the same risk culture and appetite.

However, implementing an enterprise-wide risk management programme may face many challenges in and of itself while moving away from the traditional risk management approach to the enterprise approach. Possibly the biggest challenge is to agree on a risk management strategy and risk culture/appetite acceptable to everyone. The Chief Financial Officer and Chief Compliance Officer will surely tend to be more risk averse than, say, their counterparts in Marketing and Business Development.

Once this is accomplished, what follows are the next set of challenges in justifying the benefits of enterprise risk management to the Chief Officers with compromised risk appetites. This could truly be an uphill task, the very complexity arising from the divergent levels of risk consciousness amongst the various units of an organisation and the fact that risk management teams would suddenly be under pressure to deliver positive results, the very pressure that may hinder them from defending negative outcomes.

One way to overcome these issues is to implement customisable software for managing risks that can be configured by the risk management team with guided risk assessments and automated corrective action plans for each business unit. This solution resolves the issue of different levels of risk awareness, while delegating the responsibility for risk assessments to subject matter experts in each business unit enabling the risk management team to focus on identifying positive outcomes.