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Risk Management Processes for a Healthcare Organization

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See attached file for template.

Create a specific risk management process that can assist in responding:

To an error that may occur in a healthcare organization.
Use the information and steps on the Risk Management Plan Template to complete your paper.
Complete the Risk Assessment Questionnaire Template to assess the risk in the organization (if needed).

1. Create a specific risk management process that responds to an error that may occur in a health care organization, such as billing errors, falling in a hospital, wrong site surgery, a complaint, or a medication error.

2. Write a paper identifying, analyzing, responding to, and monitoring risks and opportunities involved in the process in the internal and external environment facing the enterprise.

3. Refer: Risk Management Plan and Risk Assessment Questionnaire templates to guide you in your paper.

4. Use the Strategic Objectives at Risk (SOAR) process when examining your process.

5. Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.

6. List all your references and source in APA format

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Solution Summary

This solution contains a short writeup and details on a Risk Management Template written for a healthcare organization, but easily translated for use in other commercial sectors.

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PROBLEM STATEMENT

A 2002 study by the School of Pharmacy at Texas Tech University Health Sciences conducted research to find direct relationships among clinical pharmacy services, pharmacy staffing and medication errors. For this study, 429,827 medication errors involving 1081 hospitals were evaluated. The data gathered indicated that medication errors occurred in 5.22% of the patients admitted to hospitals each year, or 90,895 individual patients harmed annually. Correlated with hospital admission volume on a medication error/occupied hospital bed/year basis, the data indicated that a medication error occurred once per 19 admissions. Factors with a statistically noticeable impact on either an increase or decrease in medication errors were: use of patient drug-use evaluations, hospital pharmacy administrator staffing, and dispensing pharmacist staffing, access to a drug information service, the presence of pharmacists on medical rounds. As staffing for clinical pharmacists increased, medication errors were reduced by 286%. (Bond & Franke, 2002),

These statistics are not without impact to the wider society. The US Department of Health and Human Services, in its 2006 Annual National Practitioner Databank Report, indicates that over 12,000 malpractice- based payments were made in 2006, with medication related payments accounting for 619 of those payments. In those cases related to medication errors, the payment mean was $251,454 and the payment median was $132,000 (National Databank Report, 2006)) Using the more conservative median number, this equates to more than $81 million in medication error malpractice payments alone in a single year. Extrapolating from the rate of incidence indicated by the Texas Tech Study, if a hospital maintains an average of 100 occupied beds on any given day, 5 of those patients will experience a potentially harmful medication error, putting the hospital at risk for $660,000 in damages, on a daily basis. This amounts to a significant opportunity for risk management to play a role in medication error reduction.

PURPOSE OF PAPER

The purpose of this paper is to outline a risk management plan in order to reduce the raw error rate in in the hosptial medication delivery process, both in internal and external environments. Accompanying this paper is a risk management plan template developed for the specific purpose of reducing medication errors in a hospital setting. In the identification phase, data will be gathered on existing or current practices related to medication delivery and key metrics identified in order to establish a baseline incidence rate. Using the factors identified in the Texas Tech study, the hospital will then identify 2 or three mitigation strategies that can be implemented to reduce the baseline medication error incidence rate. Once implemented, the same data will be collected, post implementation of chosen mitigation strategies and compared to baseline data. In the analysis phase, the mitigation strategy shown to produce the highest reduction in errors will be strengthened and institutionalized across all hospital departments. A change management process will be implemented including education, policy development, establishment of work rules and medication delivery protocols, establishment of tools to measure performance against the new protocols and establishment of incentives for real reductions in patient medication errors on a per occupied bed/per day basis.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) will be developed as part of the policy ...

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