Blog Summary:
- Risk is unavoidable in healthcare—ranging from malpractice and procedural errors to technology and data breaches.
- A proactive, strategic approach to risk management in healthcare is essential to reduce liability, improve patient outcomes, and support operational performance.
- This blog explains what risk management in the healthcare industry entails and why it’s more important now than ever—especially in a tech-driven, compliance-heavy environment.
- This blog introduces six key strategies for mitigating risk, from using analytics to implementing custom healthcare apps – and more!
- Explore real-world examples of healthcare risk management like avoiding medication errors, improving handoffs, and preventing readmissions.
- Digital Scientists offers expert support to help healthcare organizations deploy risk management strategies effectively.
Healthcare and risk go hand-in-hand. While it may be an unfortunate reality, it’s a reality nonetheless. From administrative hiccups to technological systems that house protected data to clinical decisions and malpractice risk, healthcare organizations must navigate a complex tangle of multiple risks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
When mistakes happen, the consequences can range from loss of a patient to financial loss and more. So, taking an airtight approach to risk management in healthcare is not just helpful, it’s absolutely essential.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the core components of risk management in the healthcare industry, including why it’s critical and what specific strategies healthcare organizations can use to mitigate their own risk.
What is Risk Management in Healthcare?
As Investopedia notes, risk management “is the process of analyzing processes and practices that are in place, identifying risk factors, and implementing procedures to address those risks”.
As you are likely already well aware, or can easily imagine, there are numerous inherent risks. These include faulty equipment, medical malpractice risk, procedural risk, and much more. While it would be impossible and foolish to try to mitigate all healthcare risk, managing it is key. This is most often accomplished via a centralized reporting system.
From a high level, once risk managers establish what risks threaten a healthcare organization, they can map out how they could impact the organization, how likely they actually are to occur, and what the result would be. Then, they can devise strategies to mitigate those risks or limit their potential impact.
Why a Risk Management Plan in Healthcare Matters Now More Than Ever
About a quarter century ago, a famous study “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” was conducted by the National Institute of Medicine. This significant study estimated that nearly 100,000 people die every year due to preventable medical errors.
This study, while now quite old, was a driving force in causing healthcare organizations to rethink their approach to healthcare risk management. It ushered in an era of proactive rather than reactive healthcare risk management.
Fast-forwarding to today, healthcare challenges are more complex than ever. Providers must deal with everything from regulatory compliance to high-quality patient care to the adoption of new technologies. These come with their own set of challenges and risks, including DDoS attacks and patient confidentiality breaches.
Therefore, it’s crucial for healthcare organizations to approach risk management with a keen eye for detail. With that in mind, here are six actionable healthcare risk management strategies worth knowing.
6 Essential Healthcare Risk Management Strategies
1. Predict Risk with Analytics
Shifting from reactive care to proactive intervention is made possible at least in part by way of healthcare predictive analytics. This insight helps providers analyze historical and real-time data from EHRs and processed claims. This can help providers forecast things like the likelihood of patient readmission, find reimbursement gaps, and track deteriorating conditions that pose imminent risk.
Digital Scientists’ predictive analytics software platform can help with all of these things, supporting early action and better outcomes in value-based care models.
2. Minimize Exposure with Telehealth
Telehealth is more than a convenient method of delivering care to patients. It’s also a powerful risk management tool. From remote monitoring via connected wearables to ongoing mental health support with fewer barriers, there are endless ways to reduce your risk as a provider via the adoption and strategic use of telemedicine.
See how Digital Scientists helped CommuniCare build a HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform to reduce their risk!
3. Reduce Errors with Custom Apps
Plug-and-play software has its place, but in healthcare, it often is not adequate enough to meet the complex demands and intersecting risks. Custom apps, on the other hand, are purpose-built. Therefore, they align seamlessly with existing organizational workflows while decreasing communication breakdowns and errors.
They can also help you integrate IoT devices for real-time monitoring in conjunction with telehealth. Put together, this can help significantly reduce your healthcare risk profile.
4. Create a Culture of Safety
Empower all your staff (at every level of the organization!) to speak up and to act. The healthcare organizations that are best at managing risk embrace protocols such as I-PASS handoffs, medication verification, and surgical safety checklists.
As one study published in the NCBI notes, encouraging a culture that is collaborative and approaches risk management from a system-wide perspective is essential for long-term improvement and risk reduction.
5. Implement a Risk Management Plan
Having a documented risk management plan in place in a healthcare setting is absolutely a must when it comes to both protecting patients and mitigating legal and financial risk. This plan should cover:
- Staff education
- Cross-functional coordination
- Incident reporting
- Ongoing improvement
- …And more
6. Prioritize a Secure & Compliant Tech Stack
Reliable risk management depends on the use of secure interoperable systems. Digital Scientists’ technology offers HIPAA-compliant data handling, HL7/API integrations, and real-time alerts. This creates a trustworthy and data-driven foundation for reducing clinical, operational, and cybersecurity risk.
5 Risk Management in Healthcare Examples
The topic of risk management in healthcare is an admittedly broad one. You might be wondering what risk management in healthcare can entail. Here are some common (and high-impact) examples of risk management in healthcare in action:
- Preventing medication errors with barcode scanning and EMR checks
- Identifying high-risk patients via predictive modeling
- Avoiding wrong-site surgeries by means of surgical safety checklists
- Monitoring chronic patients at home to decrease their chance of readmission
- Enhancing communication through standardized patient handoffs
Want Help with Healthcare Risk Management Strategy?
Risk management in healthcare is a complex and multifaceted approach to reducing liability and financial loss while protecting patient safety and upholding patients’ rights, not to mention empowering providers. It’s about so much more than simply checking compliance boxes. By leveraging predictive analytics, telemedicine, and custom healthcare software, providers can address risk at every level of the organization.
Digital Scientists specializes in developing scalable and HIPAA-compliant tools and software solutions to help healthcare organizations do all that and more. Curious about how we might be able to help you reduce healthcare risk? Get in touch now! We’d be more than happy to discuss strategy and help you implement the right solutions.
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