Despite significant efforts to make healthcare systems safer, the likelihood of unfavourable incidents has not dropped significantly. The frequency of avoidable adverse events brought on by medical error has increased significantly in the more than ten years since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) first emphasized the need for a national effort to make healthcare safe (Park & Sharp, 2019). Risk management in the healthcare industry strives to establish the framework and tools necessary to methodically and proactively increase patient care standards while reducing operational and financial risks. The current emphasis of healthcare risk management is shifting from a reactive to a proactive, employing predictive analysis and risk categorization to manage risks besides patient care and medical malpractice. Only a few of the eight risk areas addressed by this comprehensive risk assessment technique include administrative, medical, and patient safety concerns, strategic, fiscal, human resources, legislative and regulatory, technological, and ecological and infrastructure-based concerns. Frontline doctors and healthcare professionals can benefit from using a standardized systems approach to detect possible risk areas, enhance diagnostic precision, and implement evidence-based therapies to enhance patient outcomes and care effectiveness.
Healthcare providers have a duty and responsibility to protect their staff members and patients from risks when they are in a healthcare setting. Effective risk management decreases wasteful costs, expenditures, and staff labour while also enhancing patient safety and healthcare quality. Patient satisfaction surveys are becoming a widespread and well-liked method for evaluating the standard of care and the patient experience. The survey’s findings are often taken into account by healthcare practitioners when they develop new strategies or assess present procedures and patient care. The process of identifying risks must be proactive, engage a number of staff members, and benefit the company while also protecting it.
Before starting the risk process, it is necessary to identify a broad framework for risk management. This approach defines the organizational strategy for risk recognition, evaluation, and management. A procedure called enterprise risk management (ERM) establishes an organization’s risk strategy and structure (Ferdosi et al., 2020). ERM, which is influenced by the entity’s board of directors and managers, aims to spot probable occurrences that might be harmful to the firm. ERM also aims to manage and monitor risks within a predetermined risk appetite and to offer a fair level of confidence over the attainment of the entity’s strategic goals. ERM offers a thorough, quantitative, and cost-effective knowledge of risks and effectively conveys the effects of those risks at all organizational levels.
Identifying and Evaluating Risk
Healthcare enterprises face similar categories of risks, such as medical, legislative, environmental, and privacy risks; however, specific risks differ based on the kind of institution. Healthcare firms employ a range of strategies to identify and assess risks and related opportunities depending on the size and complexity of the company. This category includes conventional incident, expert, audit, and critical analysis reports. ERM also uses additional active observational techniques to spot and document risk patterns and occurrences. These include patient and family satisfaction surveys, focus groups, staff reports, and brainstorming sessions. Regulatory compliance, payment problems, competition, and weather are just a few examples of the many internal and external risk elements that may be fully understood when the results from these numerous risk evaluation approaches are integrated. Employee experience, work disruption, and employee tiredness are a few examples of internal risk factors. Once a list of risks has been created and checked for cross-functional risk, which refers to hazards affecting more than one department or area of operations, the list is then assessed for chances to develop remedies, which aid in increasing the staff’s trust in the ERM program. It is possible to refer other complicated or long-term concerns for deeper analysis and the creation of all-encompassing mitigation plans.
One of the most important aspects in the risk management process is risk assessment, which includes the procedures of detecting hazards, assessing, and evaluating all potential risks. Finding, identifying, and describing the hazards that might prevent the attainment of goals is done through risk identification. Risk analysis findings are compared to risk criteria in risk evaluation to ascertain whether or not a certain level of risk is acceptable or bearable and to identify areas that require additional action. The goal of risk analysis is to determine the type, causes, and sources of the identified hazards as well as the level of risk (Pascarella et al., 2021). Thus, risk assessment enables decision-makers to decide which risks will be handled and with what priority, based on the identified and analyzed risks. In light of the fact that risk assessment may assist uncover viable solutions for risk management based on the amount of risk assessed, it becomes a vital phase in the decision-making process.
Healthcare organizations face risk and uncertainty on a regular basis, just like any other firm. Healthcare organizations will unavoidably encounter challenging situations because of human nature, the need to provide sophisticated and varied treatment, and the extremely complicated healthcare system. Healthcare risk management initiatives have often concentrated on the crucial role of patient safety and the decrease in medical mistakes that affect an organization’s capacity to carry out its purpose and avoid financial responsibility. Healthcare risk management has, however, gotten more complex over time as a result of the growing significance of healthcare technologies, rising cyber security concerns, the rapid advancement of medical science, and the industry’s constantly shifting regulatory, legal, political, and reimbursement environments. Hospitals and other healthcare systems are being obligated by these factors to expand their risk management programs from ones that are largely reactive and improving care health while also avoiding potential liability to being progressively proactive and visualize risk through the much broader lens of the overall healthcare ecosystem. The healthcare sector may go from being reactive to proactive with enterprise risk management.
The use of technology to coordinate risk mitigation activities throughout the whole organization and eliminate risk connected to specific departments or business units is another point stressed by ERM. Additionally, data analytics are integrated to enhance resource allocation, risk prioritization, departmental cohesion, and decision-making. Monitoring benchmarks is crucial for demonstrating the benefit of ERM programs (what expenses were avoided) through the use of analytics. On top of a governance framework that integrates business activities with the risk management program, these ERM components are constructed.
The healthcare industry has given safety a lot of attention all across the world. Many researches, including those pertaining to safety culture and risk minimization, have been published. Reforms motivated by safety, such the adoption of risk management systems, have been recommended as part of ongoing attempts to increase safety. However, up until now, such changes have usually placed more emphasis on incident investigation than incident prevention in the first place. This reactive technique can benefit from a method that focuses on risk assessment, such the enterprise risk management approach. Risk assessment, which is a component of the overall risk management process, strives to identify, analyze, and evaluate risks that might negatively impact the standard and safety of the treatment provided.
References
Ferdosi, M., Rezayatmand, R., & Molavi Taleghani, Y. (2020). Risk management in executive levels of healthcare organizations: Insights from a scoping review (2018). Risk Management and Healthcare Policy, Volume 13, 215–243. Web.
Park, S. J., & Sharp, A. L. (2019). Improving health and health care efficiency through risk management. Journal of Hospital Management and Health Policy, 3, 9–9. Web.
Pascarella, G., Rossi, M., Montella, E., Capasso, A., De Feo, G., Botti, G., Nardone, A., Montuori, P., Triassi, M., D’Auria, S., & Morabito, A. (2021). Risk analysis in healthcare organizations: Methodological framework and critical variables. Risk Management and Healthcare Policy, Volume 14, 2897–2911. Web.