Hospitals can outsource risk management needs
Outsourcing is the way of the future, apparently, and risk managers may not be immune. A Dallas firm is suggesting that hospitals outsource their risk management needs instead of having an employee handle risk management issues.
Robert Hughes Associates in Dallas began promoting the service in November 1996 as an outgrowth of its international insurance consulting, actuarial, and risk management services. While the service is available to any health care facility, it may not be a big threat to a professional risk manager at least for now. The company says outsourcing risk management services probably is more appropriate for health care facilities that currently depend on "part-time risk managers," such as controllers, treasurers, CPAs, and insurance agents to handle in-house risk management.
New research will look at cost of risk in health care facilities
The changing face of health care is dramatically altering the risks and liabilities, so a new research project by the Health-care Financial Management Association (HFMA) in Chicago is aimed at providing a new database of risk information that will be more applicable.
The HFMA is starting the Cost of Risk Initiative, in which health care organizations will be invited to provide cost-of-risk data. The research will provide cost-of-risk benchmarks for provider groups, and management case studies will be conducted to analyze superior performance and develop best practice models. The research will continue for the next five years.
The data will be collected using survey tools established in previous research, which showed some consistencies in the cost of risk faced by many health care organizations. Of the nine components of risk tabulated, the four largest contributors are employee benefits, professional and general liability, workers’ compensation, and risk management administration. Those results also revealed that while two organizations may have similar total cost of risk as a percentage of net patient revenues, they may have very different component cost-of-risk distributions.
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