Maintaining a seamless practice and providing healthcare to your patients are likely two main goals for your business. But without risk management and regular compliance checks, it’s impossible to achieve these things.
This article explores some helpful risk management strategies including how to mitigate risk, manage compliance and ensure you’re doing everything in your power to protect your practice.
Risk management tips to avoid liability claims
Invest in malpractice liability insurance
One of the most effective risk management strategies is to ensure that you, your practice and your team are covered with professional liability insurance. This type of coverage protects you financially should claims arise.
Informed consent (written and verbal)
Risk management also involves covering your bases with informed consent in two forms, written and verbal. In chiropractic informed consent, your patient understands and recognizes the accepted risks and benefits of the recommended treatments.
Because all treatment comes with its own set of benefits and risks, it’s important to explain every aspect to patients, then get their informed consent confirmed in two ways. This means your patient has the chance to make an educated decision about their treatment and you’re covered in the case of claims of negligence or malpractice (actual or alleged).
Tighten up your documentation organization and storage processes
If you truly want to eliminate potential risk management issues, it’s important to start with your paperwork. Documentation is the concrete, paper trail that helps you track your patients’ consent, files and history; it also ensures you’re covered in the case of alleged negligence or malpractice claims.
The more detailed and organized you can keep your documentation, the better. Create a non-negotiable procedure for your documentation. Then, ensure everyone in your clinic abides by these rules each and every time.
Ensure your practice is compliant with HIPAA and other standards
Another key to risk management is knowing the ins and outs of national standards for compliance (HIPAA and beyond). This awareness is a non-negotiable part of mitigating risk, avoiding audits, protecting your patients’ privacy and ensuring you’re running your practice legally. Compliance is an ever-changing battle. Failure to comply could result in hefty penalties or worse.
Run regular security risk assessments
One of the best risk management strategies is to run continuous, regular security checks to ensure consistency. Issues and claims can arise anytime; don’t let them catch you off-guard with less-than-stellar procedures in place.
Sure, this applies to things like documentation and ongoing informed consent procedure, but it also applies to data security. Regular risk assessments can help you identity security issues before they cause problems, ultimately avoiding threats.
Conduct regular security risk assessments to ensure you’re always operating at your best. Invest in security risk assessment tools to evaluate areas where your organization’s protected health information (PHI) could be vulnerable.
Final thoughts
Risk management means more than investing in liability insurance. You need to ensure every element of your practice is protected. Take time to evaluate your patient data processes, HIPAA and associated compliances and documentation procedures with your staff.
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