Resources for Health Facility Risk Management

Healthcare facilities risk management is a must in order to protect workers and patients, but also to protect against frivolous lawsuits. Healthcare risk management programs are de rigueur in large hospitals, but are increasingly common in small clinics and practices. Risk management for healthcare involves finding and reducing potential risks, ensuring that care and facilities are up to standards and tracking complaints carefully to prevent inadvertent negligence.

You don’t have to be a large facility with a huge budget to have a hospital risk management plan of action. Today, affordable health facility risk management services, including software, exist for healthcare environments of all sizes.

If you work in the healthcare field, you need to consider:

1. Keeping track of and evaluating incidents and complaints to identify existing risks.

2. Hiring facilities risk management services or professionals to evaluate your facility and train your personnel.

3. Going beyond healthcare risk management with solid plans that include legal assistance and insurance.

Look for healthcare risk management software

The cornerstone of any health facility risk management system is an awareness of potential risk, and there is no better way to determine the risks than by examining what is not currently working. You can use medical risk management software -- sometimes called incident reporting software -- to keep track of problems at your facility. The information you gather is invaluable to any hospital risk managers you may hire later, and the software allows you to start examining potential problems in your healthcare facility.

Choose hospital risk management services to target processes at your facility

Once you have some information about incidents and problems at your facility, a good health facility risks management service is the next step. Professionals who specialize in risk management for healthcare can help you determine additional risks in your facility -- risks that may not yet have resulted in incidents -- and can help bring your facility processes to standard. Professional hospital risk managers can also help you develop a realistic risk management plan.

Seek out healthcare risk management services to educate your staff

One of the most important issues in risk management for healthcare facilities involves employee error. Even if you have carefully structured your facility processes to provide optimal care, your staff can still make mistakes that can lead to malpractice claims. One way to combat this common problem is to look for hospital risk management services that help teach healthcare staff specific checks they can perform to reduce errors.

• Even if you have incident reporting software, it is a good idea to seek out a third party for risk management. Having a paper trail of healthcare risk management plans and practices shows that you are responsible and doing everything possible to provide the best care. In the event of a lawsuit, such evidence could be very useful.