Is Your Practice Crisis Ready?

If the first few months of 2020 taught healthcare professionals anything, it’s that they were not nearly as well prepared to handle unexpected crises as they probably thought they were. With the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, a serious economic crisis, a global increase in civil unrest, extreme weather from climate change, murder hornets in the U.S. and now cannibal rats devouring each other in large cities (because that might as well happen too, right?), it seems unexpected risks are coming from new directions almost daily.

As a result, risk management in the current world requires practices to go above and beyond the traditional areas of consideration. In the past, specialty practices primarily viewed risk from a rather limited and narrow viewpoint, mostly focusing on the usual suspects:

• Malpractice
• Cybersecurity & Data Breaches
• Regulatory Changes
• Physical Security
• Damage to Practice Brand or Provider Reputation
  
  

If You Fail to Plan, You Should Plan to Fail.

While the above risks will certainly continue to need attention, most specialty practices already have contingencies in place to address them (or at least they should). To be truly crisis ready, specialty practices must start to look beyond the commonly expected risks and prepare themselves for less obvious (but no less imminent) threats that could cripple their business or interrupt their ability to care for patients.

Making sure your practice is ready and able to handle crises requires multifaceted preparation, including but not limited to the following:

• Identifying Unique Risks
• Creating a Response Team
• Acquiring Response Plan Components
• Drafting & Implementing Response Plans
• Evaluating & Improving Your Response Plans

Now is the time for practices to make plans for future crises and form a practice response team. Failing to have these in place could poorly position specialty practices when a crisis occurs, leaving providers and staff scrambling to come up with hasty solutions. In order to mitigate the most risk and become a truly crisis ready practice, it is necessary to make preparations before things go wrong.

For detailed instructions on how to get started with the above listed tasks so you can form and maintain a fully crisis ready practice, see our new white paper The Crisis Ready Practice: Developing a Risk Management Strategy. Since the start of the pandemic, Nextech has remained committed to ensuring users have the resources, information and technology needed to adapt to the dramatic changes taking place in healthcare. To learn more about how Nextech can help your practice adopt best practices and create a long-term strategy for overall success, fill out this form and a member of our team will be in touch.