In today’s health care environment, being involved in a patient harm event can be incredibly stressful. Whether it’s called a complication, an unanticipated outcome or an adverse event, knowing you and your practice may be under scrutiny by the hospital, your insurance carrier and others – including the patient and his or her family – can make one feel isolated as well. Knowing how to avoid pitfalls in the investigative process and how to address one of these situations can make you a better participant and can potentially improve the outcome.
Most of the time, serious patient harm events undergo a root cause analysis (RCA) to determine what led to them. These RCAs are typically conducted by risk managers from the hospital or facility where they occurred, with the goal being to discover causative factors and then how to address and mitigate that risk in the future through an action...