Every healthcare organization must address risk. Some risks will be natural parts of evolving your organization, others are simply inherent parts of the healthcare field.
Since there is no such thing as completely eliminating risk from healthcare, the best you can do is mitigate, assess it, manage it, and address it in real time.
That being said, there are a lot of questions about the components of risk management today. Let’s discuss the key components of a risk management plan.
Read More: Risk Assessment Guide
What Is Risk Management?
Before diving into the parts of risk management, let’s begin with a useful definition.
Risk management means mitigating risks so they don’t affect your healthcare organization or your patients. A risk can be anything that increases your exposure to negative consequences.
This could be something that reduces revenue, damages your reputation, puts you at risk of failing audits or otherwise not maintaining compliance with regulations such as HIPAA.
By understanding what your risks are via risk management, you can take the necessary steps to improve your organization’s workflow. This helps you enhance private patient information protection, establish greater efficiency, reduce costs, and even increase profits.
In the meantime, by complying with regulations, you’ll naturally improve the outcome through your patients as well. Now that we’ve discussed what risk management is, let’s talk about key components of risk management.
The Components Of A Risk Management Framework
Risk management must be systematic, collaborative, cross-departmental, and ultimately optimized to meet compliance standards. The components of risk management are:
Identify Risk
In order to address the risk, you must understand it in the first place. Therefore, the first component of any risk management system is to identify it.
Risk Analysis
After identifying the risk, you must analyze the risk. Is it minor, moderate, or serious? What is the likelihood of it having a major impact on your organization? This allows you to prioritize how you address these risks.
Response Planning
Once you identify or analyze a risk, you must plan the proper response. This can include security awareness training and other best practices.
Risk Mitigation
Ongoing education material, protocols, and other measures must be taken to minimize the risk in the future.
Risk Monitoring
Using the right software, you can keep an eye on your risks and perform regular assessments. From here, you can ensure that you’re mitigating risk where possible and continuing the safe handling of data throughout the organization.
Get Help With Your Risk Management
When it comes to managing risk, you need the right tools and technology. Reach out to ComplyAssistant.
Our healthcare risk management software is state-of-the-art. It will allow you to assess your highest areas of risk, establish transparent communication, and track your compliance program from beginning to end. Contact us for a free demo today.