History of health care risk management programs
Although a mature function in the insurance and banking industry prior to this time, Risk Management activities were inducted into the health care industry during the late 1970's in response to the growing national malpractice insurance crisis. At that time, the function was essentially comprised of Quality Assurance nurses performing incident report review and trending in acute care hospitals, but there was little to no proactive loss prevention or control activities.
Due to the increase in frequency and severity of lawsuits in health care, hospital Risk Managers quickly broadened their knowledge and approach to loss prevention, spearheaded by the American Hospital Association's development of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM) and their educational programs. During the 1990's, there was significant growth in the number and location of Risk Management programs in health care as Risk Management began to separate from QA and become a recognized entity in its own right. Professional health care Risk Managers could soon be found performing the functions of loss prevention, control and risk transfer in medical groups, ambulatory care facilities, and managed care companies by the end of that decade.
In the 1980's and 1990's, managed care began to feel the brunt of plaintiff actions with resulting extremely high punitive damage and compensatory awards. In the decade of 2000, senior housing and services began to experience an increase in lawsuits and class actions concurrent with greater emphasis on quality outcomes and more unrealistic expectations of families and residents. These factors contributed to an increase in the frequency of lawsuits and severity of jury awards in an environment already riddled with regulations and scrutiny by oversight regulatory agencies.
Managing risk is a proactive function…it is taking action to reduce the frequency and severity of unexpected incidents, reduce the impact of legal claims, and promote high reliability performance and outcomes because of awareness that performance, system design, and the uniqueness of each patient exposes an organization to the potential for adverse outcomes.
CORE Risk Services, Inc has been established to help health care organizations meet their strategic goals by implementing loss prevention and control processes.
For additional information, contact:
Kelley Woodfin RN, BS, DFASHRM, CPHRM President, CORE Risk Services, INC.
1914 East 9400 South #103
Sandy, Utah 84093
Office: (801) 930-5380
Fax: (818)484-2165
Cell: (310)749-0196