Project Risk Management for Healthcare
The healthcare projects are faced with many challenges like dealing high- budget projects to deliver high – quality projects adhering to healthcare safety policies and regulations. The healthcare projects deal with sensitive patient data that involves high-risk and it needs to be protected by applying HIPAA security laws. These laws ensure that adequate security means are taken by healthcare organizations to potential threats to the ePHI that are collected by medical professionals.
An effective risk-management strategy helps the project team to take corrective measures to resolve any major project issues. Every organization must have a centralized risk management reporting system that helps the team to be on the same platform and look out for potential vulnerabilities that affected the project.
How to implement Risk Management
It is important to implement the risk management process in the right way. The following are the risk management steps:
Plan and Implement- Risk management must be planned well and in this step, we need to prepare a skeleton that has the detailed security measures needed to mitigate the risks. This plan needs to be created by adhering to the HIPAA security rules. This helps to reduce errors and ensure that better project decisions are taken.
Implement Security Measures – It is important to implement security measures abiding by the HIPAA rules, these measures can be applied to secure the following components:
Server
- Need to lock the server room and access must be given only to authorized people
- Updated Anti-virus must be run regularly
- Employee access must be monitored after notifying them
Data Encryption
- Unencrypted data external to the organization must be prohibited.
- ePHI must be sent with high encryption standards
Other IT and non-IT components
- Hard drives of old desktops must be deleted
- Passwords must be strong and not be shared among employees
- Fire-extinguisher in place and checked regularly
Must –Do’s for an efficient risk management
- Need to implement an incident reporting system
- Take proper preventive and corrective measures
- Have a proper complaint system
- Educating the team about risk management and security measures
- Implementing inter and cross-department collaboration
A proper risk management process brings in the effective security measures helping the healthcare organization to protect their data, finance, and also provide improved quality and patient safety. These risk management plans must be developed and evaluated by the healthcare risk managers by considering both internal and external factors to the project and the organization and also they need to comply with HIPAA security norms.
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