HIROC supports subscribers’ RMSAM™ efforts
Friday October 5, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Kathy Millar says having staff from the Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC) host in-house training sessions for the Risk Management Self-Appraisal Modules (RMSAM™) at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto helped the hospital and the reciprocal find some common ground on terminology.

Millar, the corporate director of patient safety and chief of enterprise risk management at St. Joseph’s Health Centre, says the HIROC sessions have helped her organization get on track with the self-appraisal modules after a slow start.

“We’re quite deep into it now,” Millar says, adding she initially had one vision of how the modules would roll-out while HIROC had another.

"Because the self-assessment tool was based on past HIROC claims and classifications, and was intended to be used by multiple facilities, when
we tried to apply it to our own institution, minor modifications had to be made to allow for differences in hospital organization or clinical practice," says Genefer Behamdouni, the manager of enterprise risk management at St. Joseph’s Health Centre.

Millar says HIROC was asked to set up a web-based demo of the RMSAM™ at St. Joseph’s Health Centre for staff involved in the self-appraisal modules.

"After working through the demo with HIROC, we all had a better understanding of what was being asked and could make the self-assessment fit our organization in a meaningful way," says Behamdouni.

Behamdouni and Millar say the RMSAM™ has already helped identify a number of risk issues.

“It gave us the opportunity to look at the other people’s experiences, which is really what it was about, so we could be proactive in changes we wanted to make in certain areas as opposed to waiting for an incident to happen here in the hospital,” Behamdouni says.

One of those issues is common language between inter-disciplinary teams. For example, if a patient has been identified as constant care in one area of the hospital, they would now be identified as constant care in every area.

“It’s the same across the board so every clinician knows what constant care means, no matter where the patient is located,” Millar says. “Even though we had a process in place, it actually allowed us to review that process to ensure that it is meeting the needs of our patients and the team members.”

Millar says the board at St. Joseph’s Health Centre is also kept up to date on findings from the RMSAM™ and is aware of the hospital’s risk areas.

While the RMSAM™ is focused on clinical settings, Millar says it would be helpful if it could be used in other service areas.

“Finance for instance, but it doesn’t give you the indicators to really identify what the level of risk is in some of these other support areas,” she says, adding if there was anything HIROC could do modify their tool to better meet risk management needs outside of a clinical setting, it would be welcome.

Until then, Millar says Behamdouni, with her expertise in enterprise risk management, is “working with the other support areas to identify risk factors, the level of risk and their control and mitigation strategies.”