MEDICAL MALPRACTICE
Ambulatory Health Care requires facilities to develop risk-management programs. The CMS State Operating Manual stops short of requiring risk-management programs, but it does call on organizations to identify and reduce medical errors and adverse patient events. The Institute of Medicine has created some helpful definitions:
• An error is defined as the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended.
• An adverse event is an injury caused by medical management, rather than by the underlying condition of the patient.
• An adverse event attributable to error is a preventable adverse
event.
CMS and AAAHC expect you to focus on high-risk, high-volume and problem-prone areas when selecting indicators for improvement activities. Both also expect you to demonstrate a link
between risk management and quality-improvement activities. Review your incident-reporting policy and make sure you're tracking trends and analyzing the events defined above to determine where you need to focus your improvement efforts.
Ongoing evaluation of your plan
Once you've developed a formal risk-management plan, periodically evaluate it. What risks have you identified and what improvements have you made? In addition to the ongoing assessments, each year determine the program's effectiveness. Here are 5 action steps:
• Assess indicators to ensure you're collecting the right information to identify and reduce risk.
• Do you have ample resources to ensure prompt analyses and follow-up when there are events?
