Risk Management in Emergency Preparedness
A Vital Priority for Healthcare Professionals
In today’s healthcare landscape, medical practices and hospitals face a growing array of threats—from natural disasters and medical emergencies to workplace violence. For agents partnering with ProAssurance insureds, understanding and promoting risk management strategies in these areas is essential to safeguarding both providers and patients.
Natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires can disrupt operations, damage infrastructure, and delay critical care. Without proper emergency preparedness, these events can lead to adverse patient outcomes and potential malpractice claims. Similarly, medical emergencies, whether isolated instances or mass casualty events, require swift, coordinated responses to minimize exposures.
Workplace violence presents another area of liability where risk management can assist. Healthcare workers are among the most frequently assaulted professionals, and violent incidents can compromise care delivery and injure staff, patients, and bystanders.1 A provider distracted or harmed during a violent episode may inadvertently commit a medical error, opening the door to malpractice litigation. Recognizing the dangers of workplace violence for healthcare providers is the first step in working toward a solution of safer and more effective care.
From an insurance perspective, risk management is not just a precaution—it’s a strategic imperative. Encouraging insureds to implement emergency preparedness plans, conduct regular emergency drills, and establish workplace violence prevention protocols can significantly reduce claim frequency and severity.
The Risk Management department at ProAssurance is committed to providing resources and support to allow insureds to better prepare for the unknown. Encouraging insureds to adopt policies such as de-escalation training, secure facility design, and clear reporting protocols can mitigate the risks. Planning for these emergencies also demonstrates a commitment to patient and staff safety, which can positively influence the culture of the organization.
Our agency partners play a key role in educating clients about these risks and can partner with the ProAssurance Risk Management team to deliver education, provide feedback on current policies, and develop strategies to mitigate these risks. Through our new Tabletop Exercises, which you can read about in this issue, and enduring online CME programs, healthcare professionals and staff can educate themselves and conduct onsite training to prepare for various scenarios and develop a crisis response.
By positioning risk management as a strategic investment, you can help medical practices and hospitals protect their people, patients, and reputations.
1American College of Surgeons
Risk Management Launches Its Latest Emergency Preparedness Tool for Insureds
ProAssurance Risk Management is excited to introduce our latest resource to help practices hone their emergency preparedness: Tabletop Exercises.
Regardless of an organization’s size, location, or industry, it is not immune from emergency situations or high-risk circumstances that may occur. Healthcare practices are no different; they should anticipate, plan for, and be prepared to effectively respond to urgent situations they might encounter in their particular setting. Scenario-based planning tools like Tabletop Exercises are critical in assessing a team’s emergency response capacity and highlighting gaps in knowledge and policies.
A widely utilized resource across various industries, Tabletop Exercises can help healthcare teams gain insight into their emergency planning and response readiness, and underscore where further instruction and training may be needed. Tabletop sessions focus staff on their organization’s specific, established protocols (or lack thereof), while identifying unique, role-based responsibilities during emergencies.
The ProAssurance Risk Management department has created a complementary suite of healthcare-specific Tabletop Exercises for use by practices of any size, specialty, or location. These Tabletops encourage and allow our insureds to cooperatively close the gap between clinical risk and real-time preparedness.
One of the reasons the ProAssurance Risk Management team created Tabletops was to address a resource gap identified through our Annual Baseline Self-Assessment, or ABSA. In our survey of several risk management categories, we noticed that regardless of practice size or specialty, responses commonly indicated a lack of drills and preparation for all types of in-office emergencies, as illustrated in this ABSA report example.
The Tabletop Exercises each take around 60-90 minutes and are designed to apply to any practice’s distinct setup and staff ratios. They are informal, collaborative discussions that review emergency or unexpected situations arising in the healthcare setting. These sessions help organizations develop the roles that key team members may play and their individual and collective responses during specific emergencies. To gauge response readiness, identified team members will talk through a fact pattern and apply it to their office layout, workflow, staff structure, and policies, while incorporating best practices.
We currently have four scenarios published on the Risk Management site, with more scenarios in the works:
- Medication Adverse Reaction
- Natural Disaster: Power Outage
- Medical Emergency on Premises
- Workplace Violence: Active Shooter
We are pleased to offer this new, proactive learning tool to our insureds. Under pressure in a time-sensitive environment, favorable results do not occur in the absence of dedicated preparation and practice. Understanding the actions needed and consequences of an emergency—including which staff must act, when they should act, and what steps they will need to take—sets up practices for increased patient safety and risk mitigation.
We will be promoting Tabletops in our various marketing channels, including our monthly Risk Management emails as well as future issues of ProVisions. We also encourage you to share this new preparedness tool with your ProAssurance clients.
The Tabletop Exercises are available on the Risk Management website in the Education menu or go directly to RiskManagement.ProAssurance.com/tabletop-exercises.
After developing a thorough preparation and mitigation plan, healthcare providers should then focus on their response and recovery plan. Please visit the ProAssurance Disaster Mitigation bundle for additional resources and strategies.
Many of these resources can be used to ensure you are prepared as well. As you share this information with your clients, take a moment to ensure your office records will be safe during an adverse event and that you will still be able to service your insureds. The peace of mind that comes with preparation is well worth the time you put into it.
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Selling the What-If Moments
Risk is ever-present in healthcare—for patients, providers, and yes, even for you as an MPL agent.
That’s good news. It means there’s always an opportunity to add value. But here’s the catch: People resist spending money on problems they haven’t experienced yet. In healthcare, I’ve seen time and again how easy it is to ignore a risk—until it becomes real.
My ‘How Often Does That Happen?’ Moment
I spent my sales career selling orthopedic implants for total hip and total knee replacements. The implants are made of metal and polyethylene (a plastic) components that are assembled in the O.R. I always carried two sets of polyethylene components into surgery, so if one were dropped, I’d have a backup.
My company changed its policy to provide only one set of polyethylene implants for each total joint surgery, aiming to reduce inventory costs. This decision seemed crazy to me. In surgery, you always have a backup.
I took my concern to management, who said they needed to limit inventory due to costs. When I asked what a surgeon should do if the only appropriately sized polyethylene component lands on the floor, their defense was, “How often does that happen?”
How often? Not often. But that wasn’t the point. I asked them, “How will we look when it does happen?”
When the Backup Isn’t There
The what-if hit one day when I wasn’t present for a case. Somebody accidentally tossed the selected polyethylene component in the trash.
The result? There was an hour’s delay while the surgeon and the entire O.R. waited for a backup to be delivered. More anesthesia time. More risk to the patient. More stress for everyone involved. If you want to see how quickly a surgeon’s opinion of you can change, add an hour to their case because the part they need is sitting in a warehouse instead of in their O.R.
Translating Risk Into Relevance
You might be thinking, What does any of this have to do with MPL insurance?
Everything.
When you’re selling to physicians or practice administrators, you’ll hear a lot of “how often does that happen?” when you bring up rare-but-catastrophic scenarios like hurricanes, active shooter events, or network outages. And this is precisely where you can differentiate yourself.
Salespeople typically stick to discussing what’s comfortable: common liability claims along with the risks everyone already knows. But the agent who says, “Let’s walk through what happens if there’s a flood or a hurricane hits and shuts down your clinic for three days”? That’s the agent who becomes memorable to clients for all the right reasons.
Making Risk Real
After enduring the stress and backlash from not having a second set of polyethylene components, the policy reverted to providing backups. Reality has a way of driving better decisions.
Here’s the key: Don’t just tell clients that crisis events could happen. Show them the impact when it does.
- The patient in the O.R. who had their surgery delayed.
- The clinic without a generator that needed to cancel a full day of procedures.
- The EMR outage that required contacting patients one-by-one to deliver lab results.
When you connect a risk to real consequences, it’s no longer abstract but relevant to the client’s world.
What are the odds of one of your clients experiencing a workplace disaster this week? Low. But the impact if it happens? It’s huge!
Don’t avoid risk conversations because they’re uncomfortable. Run toward them now while we’re still talking about what-ifs. The best agents aren’t just selling policies. They’re selling increased peace of mind—before those what-ifs become what-is.
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Written by Mace Horoff of Medical Sales Performance. Mace Horoff is a representative of Sales Pilot. He helps sales teams and individual representatives who sell medical devices, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, healthcare services, and other healthcare-related products to sell more and earn more by employing a specialized healthcare system. Have a topic you’d like to see covered? Email your suggestions to AskMarketing@ProAssurance.com. |
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