Understanding risks and how to avoid them was top priority for the team at Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA), but gathering information from the nine hospitals, 36 long-term care facilities, and community health centers across the region was challenging.
When the Internal Audit and Quality Improvement and Patient Safety team at WRHA first began rolling out Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), they identified over 270 risks, 40 risk themes and the 15 top risks for the region. At the time, their risk management data was being tracked in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
According to Christy Rogowski, Improvement Manager and Diane Jansen, Director of Audit and Risk Services at the WRHA, they started noticing roadblocks to the risk management work they were trying to carry out: Excel was not web-based and, as a result, it was difficult for key players across the region to access the program. Manually updating the spreadsheet database was also complex and time-consuming for the central team.
“It was something that we were struggling with, how do we continue rolling ERM out within our organization with the tool that we currently have?” says Jansen.
For WRHA, the answer was implementing RL6:RiskRegister to consolidate and bring renewed focus to risk mitigation across their facilities.
According to Rogowski, there were three main benefits that coincided with launching:
- Being able to launch with enterprise risk champions — or as Rogowski calls them, “super-users” — that helped facilitate roll-out.
- The ability to keep data consistent across the region and to centrally store it and access it.
- Customizing the reporting system to provide staff with new, effective options.
Now, WRHA has the flexibility to measure and manage risk across the enterprise or within individual facilities — without the hassle of spreadsheets. According to Rogowski and Jansen, the next steps are to launch Risk Register to new sites and programs.
Learn how you can more effectively manage healthcare risk with Risk Register.
