The Evolution of Vendor Risk Management in Healthcare

What issues should healthcare risk management help address?

An outdated, inefficient risk management process can lead to negative consequences for everyone involved. Patients will experience:

• Longer hospital stays
• Negative medical events
• Incorrect tests and treatments
• Higher costs
• More readmissions

Additionally, doctors and facilities are at risk for malpractice claims, government penalties, consolidation, aging facilities and infrastructures, and workplace shortages. An effective risk management process for any healthcare facility must address overall patient safety and prevention of common medical errors while maintaining protocol consistency.

Privacy and cybersecurity in healthcare

The biggest cost to consumers and a provider’s bottom line is patient privacy and HIPAA compliance. It’s crucial to have monitoring capabilities to ensure vendors abide by the Health Insurance Portability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) standards.

Under HIPAA, its Privacy Rule establishes national standards for the protection of certain health information.  Its Security Rule establishes a national set of security standards for protecting specific health information that’s held or transferred in electronic form. A healthcare data warehouse supports these standards by providing a secure, centralized repository for sensitive health information.

According to an Accenture analysis, healthcare providers that do not make cybersecurity a strategic priority will put $305 billion of cumulative lifetime patient revenue at risk over the next five years.

The benefits of adding a VRM software solution

Today’s technological, organizational, and legal requirements have made allocating resources to HIPAA compliance a challenge. To protect patient privacy and care, cut costs, and increase revenue, a sophisticated and agile solution is needed.

A system-wide, integrated approach guarantees a patient-centered approach to VRM. The right VRM system can help covered entities stay in compliance and deliver value to your bottom line by:

• Incorporating a wide range of patient safety, insurance, and risk management data into a centralized and interactive system.
• Data input automatically generating real-time analysis of a diverse range of patient safety, insurance, and risk-related information as well as workflows and activities.
• Standardizing data from varied sources into common formats that can integrate with each other, prompting risk management activity or analysis.
• Reducing time and costs associated with vendor assessments.
• Providing the ability to benchmark your own risk assessments and achieve repeatable, auditable results.
• Generating custom reports showing which vendor and third-party records are in or out of compliance and exactly what is needed to remediate the gaps.

With a comprehensive VRM solution, you never have to fear if you’re meeting HIPAA requirements.  The time savings, meanwhile, free you and your team to focus on work that’s more important to immediate staff and patient needs.

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