Saturday, July 4, 2009

How do Healthcare Providers Manage Risk?

By Roberta Broyles

A lot of hospitals are now engaging their employees into getting risk management certifications that they can then use to better manage risks in their hospitals. In order to understand the need for and the importance of such a certification in the healthcare industry you need to first understand what does risk management signify.

Management of risk consists of various steps. The first is the understanding and assessment of risk. Next comes the prioritization of risk. Once risks are prioritized, they need to be either avoided or managed. For the same we must try and put all our resources to work against the risks. This requires a lot of planning and understanding of risk as well as risk mitigation at all levels of authority.

Most healthcare organizations are exposed to risk because of the actions of their employees. In fact there was a study done in 1993 that stated that hospitals paid about one hundred billion dollars in damages in a year just because of employee negligence. Hiring an employee with a criminal record cost a lot of these hospitals and health care centers dearly.

Many suits have been filed against hospitals that employ people with criminal records. This is done because the law says that employees must be recruited in the hospital only after "due diligence". Making the employees understand the consequences of all their actions is the responsibility of someone who has a proper risk management certification. Armed with this the employee can serve the organization much better and problems like these can be avoided.

A comprehensive program for risk management must be run in the hospital to avoid risk. An employee who has a risk management certification should be hired and should be allowed to create the program. There are many ways to assess risks using such programs.

A risk management certification teaches many different methods to assess and identify risks that a healthcare organization might face. Employees are trained to log in incidents that they believe may lead to greater risk. Next, these risks are analyzed at a higher level and worked against.

Observation is considered to be one o the methods of risk mitigation. In this method all the employees are asked to keep a note of all the instances during a normal day, which might expose the organization to greater risk. The risk mitigation team will then sit together to assess and understand these risks.

You can learn all these techniques and some more be getting a risk management certification from a proper university. That will set you and your organization on a safer and risk mitigated path to progress.

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