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Changing role of risk management with expanding healthcare technologies and digital transformation

Healthcare organizations identify and evaluate risks as a means to reduce injury to patients, staff members, and visitors within an organization. Traditionally risk management has focused on patient safety and the reduction of medical errors. But with the expanding role of healthcare technologies and expedited digital transformation because of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare risk management has become more complex over time.

In May of 2017, Moody’s Investor Services released a report highlighting the link between risk management and a hospital’s operating margins: “Maintaining high clinical quality will increasingly impact financial performance and reduce the risk of brand impairment as reimbursement moves away from a fee-for-service model and towards a greater emphasis on value and outcomes.”

For above reasons, hospitals and other healthcare systems are expanding their risk management programs from ones that are primarily reactive and promote patient safety and prevent legal exposure, to ones that are increasingly proactive.

A medium or large hospital typically has anywhere from 500 to 800 health information interfaces between health systems for registration, orders, results, charges, etc. With the expanding technologies, there are increasing number of electronic systems used in various departments and specialties. These systems are either hosted internally or increasingly hosted in the cloud.

With increasing number of systems and in turn increasing number of interfaces between systems, it is becoming a risk to rely on manual reporting of system issues in production environment. It typically anywhere from 40-60 min to identify an issue in live environments and its’ completely reliant on users finding the issue and informing help desk to begin the process of diagnosing and fixing the issue on hand. Prolonged system issues in live environment can lead to potential adverse patient outcomes because of missing critical information.

Enterprise risk management strategy of an organization are considering using proactive automated live system checks and interfaces monitoring to reduce risk associated with increasing number of electronic systems and applications in healthcare.

Learn more about Tido’s End to End Systems Monitoring to automate live systems issues detection and significantly reduce time to diagnose and resolve potential patient safety issues.