Managing risk in a healthcare system is a tough job. And in this era of quality measures and reimbursement reform, the job of not just managing risk, but also proactively improving patient safety is critical. That’s because improving patient safety improves overall patient outcomes, a goal that’s being driven by declining reimbursements and a potential loss of reputation if organizations aren’t able to demonstrate compliance with the Affordable Care Act‘s mandates — two situations that could put a health system out of business. To reduce the current inefficiencies in the risk management process, two solutions are necessary: an EDW and a simple data entry application tool. These solutions will give risk managers — and everyone else involved in the process — an easy-to-use tool to review the risk event in near real time and in one location. This approach eliminates the current tedious process of using emails and meetings to collaborate on each event.

1. Streamlining the Risk Management
Process in Healthcare to Improve
Workflow and Increase Patient Safety
- Anne Marie Bickmore

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Managing Risk in Healthcare Systems
Hospital risk managers juggle
many responsibilities to keep
their organizations safe.
They are responsible for
identifying high-risk areas that
could cause harm to patients,
visitors, and employees.
They must implement
programs to avert risks and
ensure adverse events are
adequately reported.

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Why Improve Patient Safety
Improving patient safety
improves overall patient
outcomes. There are
additional incentives for
avoiding adverse events.
These include:
1. Declining Reimbursements
2. Reputation

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Why Improve Patient Safety?
Declining Reimbursements
The Hospital-Acquired
Condition (HAC) Reduction
Program under the ACA aims
to reduce the occurrence of
preventable conditions that
occur after a patient enters a
healthcare facility.
Beginning in 2015, Medicare
instituted a maximum one
percent penalty for hospitals in
the higher quartile for adverse
events not present on patient
admission.

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Why Improve Patient Safety?
Reputation
With the explosion of publically
available information and
patient reviews, the reputation
of a healthcare system is
paramount.
With websites like Medicare’s
Hospital Compare, it’s easy for
consumers to see how
hospitals rate in various areas
of performance, clinical and
operational.

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The Need for Accuracy in Reporting
Because reimbursements and
reputation are crucial to a
hospitals performance,
accurate identification of
adverse events is critical.
All departments must be able to
follow the event’s progress
through the risk management
workflow.
Unfortunately, a lot of risk data
isn’t captured in the EMR.

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The Solution for Risk Managers
A healthcare enterprise data
warehouse (EDW) provides
adverse event information,
accessible from a central
location where all departments
can see it simultaneously.
With the EDW platform in place,
the health system can add a
simple data entry application
tool that runs on top of the
system but stores the data in
the EDW.

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Proactive Risk Management
An EDW empowers risk
managers to be more proactive.
Risk management is, by nature,
a reactionary process — an
event occurs, and risk
managers respond to it.
In short, surveillance and
analytics enable hospitals to
identify their risk points and
implement risk reduction
measures.

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Risk Management in the Era of
Accountable Care
Managing risk is difficult,
especially when risk managers
don’t have the right tools for
collaboration.
An EDW provides a central
data repository and offers a
single source of truth that all
collaborators can rely on for
their assessment of each event.

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Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
Streamlining the Risk Management Process in Healthcare to Improve
Workflow and Increase Patient Safety

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For more information:
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– John Haughom, MD, Senior Advisor, Health Catalyst

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Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
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Anne Mare Bickmore joined Health Catalyst in December 2012. Prior to coming to
Catalyst, she worked for Lantana Consulting as the lead Project Manager (2011-2012),
Director of Informatics at Swedish American Hospital Rockford, IL (2010-2011), and
Intermountain Healthcare serving in multiple leadership roles both clinical and IT (1999-
2011). Anne Marie has dual Bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Nursing from the
University of Utah.