Elements of Effective Risk Management for Physicians

 

Your custom risk management protocols and systems will be derived from a critical "drill down" analysis of your medical practice.  Reducing risk across your entire medical  enterprise will address the following:

• Patient Education and Informed Consent: build stronger patient relations  based on patient satisfaction.  Education and information should reduce the potential for antagonism arising from bad outcomes and/or unanticipated events.
• Documentation: Your best defense is an adequately documented chart.  The current focus on Electronic Medical Records will present challenges to maintaining a useful and fully documented chart, including communications by telephone and email.
• HIPAA: build compliance into your management and maintenance of medical records.  Understanding exceptions to HIPPA will facilitate risk reduction associated with patient hand-offs
• Patient Hand-Offs and Referrals:  Standardized plans under the Joint Commission SHARE program are just a start for addressing had-off and referral issues.  Ensuring that proper and adequate patient information is transmitted will reduce risk.
• Incident Reporting & Disclosure of Unanticipated Events: Proper responses to these issues will provide a basis for post-event treatment.  Full discussion with the patient will meet Informed Consent standards.  Protecting the confidentiality of the information as part of the Quality Assurance program will reduce risk.
• Electronic Medical Records:  The trend to utilize electronic medical records requires further analysis to reduce risk.  Understanding new sources of risk arising from alerts, templates limitations on narrative or free text, and the overuse of check boxes is now required under a complete risk reduction program. 
• Insurance:  New relationships under the ACA will require analysis of current coverage, with the potential of obtaining new policy coverage for the scope of the new statutes reach.