Health Care Risk Management License

Medicine has expanded in its ability to provide care that treats injury and cures disease. But the price paid for these advances is a vastly more complex system that includes professions that did not exist mere decades ago. One of these professions is Health Care Risk Management. Like other highly technical fields, this one requires a license.

Modern Medicine

• While physicians practice medicine, they do so with the assistance and support of professionals from various fields. Nurses provide services requiring specialized medical knowledge. Technicians operate and service complex and sometimes dangerous equipment. Financial professionals ensure that facilities remain fiscally viable, despite the enormous overhead they face and their responsibility to treat patients that may not be able to pay. Intrinsic to this complexity is the chance that a mistake will be made by any of these personnel that will directly cause harm to a patient. Because major settlements for malpractice can be so costly, the role of Medical (or Health Care) Risk Manager was developed.

Role

• Risk managers oversee operations of a health care facility in order to ensure that they do not pose an unacceptably high degree of risk. A physical hazard to the safety of patients or visitors must be corrected. Procedural hazards, like an inefficient system of record-keeping, are also addressed. Legal aspects of patient care, like the wording of consent forms or visitation policies, are also relevant. For most purposes, "risk" involves the possibility of an event that causes a physical or emotional insult to a patient or family. Families may respond to this via legal action.

Eligibility

• Because the knowledge necessary to competently manage this risk is so broad and detailed, only certain individuals are eligible to become health care risk managers. In most states, only medical personnel are eligible to apply for a license. Extensive education is provided concerning workplace safety, procedural risks to patient safety and law. The training assumes that the student already has extensive knowledge of medicine. Medical doctors, chiropractors, registered nurses, pharmacists, paramedics, radiographers and some other professionals are allowed. This varies somewhat from state to state.

Training

• The nature of concepts like risk, negligence, consent, liability and malpractice are central to the training. Also discussed are techniques for implementing procedures that provide for educating staff, reducing errors and effectively communicating with both the staff and the public. While one of the primary purposes of risk managers is to protect their establishments from expensive legal action, remember that health care risk managers seek to do this primarily by protecting patients from accidental injury. The precise length and content of courses is regulated by each state, but between 100 and 150 hours of classroom instruction is typical.

Careers

• Once an eligible professional has taken the course and obtained a license, she can work as a healthcare risk manager. Larger facilities present a greater quantity of work, but also face a greater potential for legal action against them (because they treat more patients). Logically, they offer greater pay. Smaller facilities are more likely to employ EMT's, radiographers or similar technicians who have obtained a license. Large medical centers prefer RNs or physicians. In either case, the workers are paid somewhat more than what they would receive working clinically in their disciplines.