Resilience Planning for Healthcare Practitioners and Their Practices
Keith Erwood and the Endurance™ Team at Erwood Group have extensive experience with helping healthcare professionals prepare for disruptions to their healthcare practices. With their intimate knowledge of the healthcare industry, Erwood Group can rapidly and efficiently create and deploy their business continuity, crisis management, and IT disaster recovery plans within six weeks for most healthcare practitioners. Learn more about Erwood Groups, Resilience Planning for Healthcare Practitioners and Their Practices below as we outline how we expertly build your Enduring Medical Practice™.
Whether you’re a cardiac surgeon, orthopedic surgeon, plastic surgeon, pediatric physician, family physician, maxillofacial surgeons, orthodontist, dentist or a practitioner anywhere in between we can help make your practice resilient.
Healthcare practices today face enormous challenges from reductions in and more scrutinized insurance and government assistance payments that reduce cashflow, cybersecurity issues, staffing coverage and more.
That’s all before we include other disruptive events like power outages, natural disasters, disgruntled people, fires, IT issues and other disruptions to your practice. Then we have city, state and federal compliance mandates, litigation and insurance issues.
With over 15+ years of direct healthcare experience himself and working with clients like SHARP HealthCare to increase their business continuity and emergency preparedness planning we have the experience and expertise to help you not only to achieve your resilience goals but to help you protect your practice and legacy to become an Enduring Business™.
Life Safety and Patient Protection
First, healthcare is unlike other businesses as patient safety and life safety is always the priority. Protecting your patients, staff and you is job number one. We put that first.
How Resilience Planning for Healthcare Practitioners and Their Practices Works
Step One: Initial Consultation
Keith will meet you and your team and ask key questions to get to know your business and if your practice is a fit for our Done-With-You program or our Done-for-You program. This step ends with setting a date for the onboarding meeting.
Step Two: Client Onboarding
Our client onboarding framework is designed to streamline and make the progress of your practice preparedness and resilience viewable immediately with our Endurance Dashboard™ within our client portal.
We utilize our client portal and the Endurance Dashboard™ as a place where we can communicate, track and document your program progress and safely and securely share documents about your practice. Only you, your selected team members and our Endurance Team™ will have access to the portal and Endurance Dashboard™.
This client portal and Endurance Dashboard™ is a single source for developing your Resilience Planning for Healthcare Practitioners and Their Practices. Additionally, it acts as a secondary backup for your plan and program access in a crisis or emergency.
Step Three: Practice Discovery
This is where we get to work and take a deep dive into your healthcare practice. We’ll learn the key specifics about how you run and operate your practice.
Facilities & Assets:
We’ll begin by discussing your facilities, backup power, maximum expected running time, physical security, facility location and hazards, other key assets, etc.
IT/Data:
Next, we’ll look at your Information Technology, data backup, how often you backup, medical equipment, how often you test backup systems, last time you tested backups, and verify if this meets the needs/requirements of your medical practice, etc.
Processes:
We’ll look at your practice processes and procedures, how you do everything from patient scheduling, getting patients ready during their visit, collecting key information, collecting co-payments, submitting claims, sending in prescriptions, tracking payments, tracking prescriptions, administering medications, and more.
People:
We’ll next look at your people, including patients and staff. How to account for patient safety, communicating with patients, communicating with staff, how to communicate in an emergency or disruption to staff and patients, cross-training of staff, workforce operations, workforce staffing, workforce staffing shortages and crises.
Vendors:
We’ll review and check your vendor contingency requirements; secondary, and tertiary vendor requirement needs. If needed, we can perform a vendor contingency status review of your vendors.
Step Four: Risk Identification & Risk Assessment
The next step is to Identify and assess your practice for risks that you may face based on your geographical location, healthcare industry, and practice level risks and best practices in other areas. This step is vital to building your Resilience Planning for Healthcare Practitioners and Their Practices. One of the biggest reason for plan and strategy failures is the lack of proper risk idetification.
Step Five: Business Impact & Financial Impact Analysis
Next, we’ll look at how these risks, threats and hazards will impact your medical practice as a whole and to certain specific key areas that can impact your operations and cause disruption to various elements of your medical practice operationally.
We’ll also identify key areas that may cause life safety issues within your medical practice, such as equipment failures, communications issues, and other known areas of risk within the healthcare industry.
Then, we’ll assess and find areas of risk that may impact, disrupt or delay your revenue collections.
These previous five steps form the basis of your resilience program and is the foundation upon which your plan and program will be created and built.
This step is also vital to effectively building your Resilience Planning for Healthcare Practitioners and Their Practices as improper impact assessments can miss or overlook the impacts from risks to your medical practice.
Step Six: Strategy Selection & Plan Creation
At this point we will begin developing strategies to put into place providing you with resilient preparedness procedures and protocols to follow in the event any of your key critical operating areas are impacted by disruptions.
Think of the plans as your toolbox for dealing with disruptive events and the strategies as the tools that you can utilize to mitigate the disruptive impacts to your medical practice, your patients, and of course your staff. Each new strategy provides you with the tools needed to keep your practice running smoothly.
Our goal is to lessen the overall disruptive impacts and to ideally keep your practice running during nearly any even building you a lasting and enduring medical practice, protecting your business and legacy well into the future.
Step Seven: Exercising, Maintenance, Reviewing & Updating
Congratulations. You now have completed your plan and have resilient medical practice. Let’s take you Beyond Resilience™ and make your medical practice an Enduring Medical Practice™.
We do this by taking you through our Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™ or LPIC™ framework and system of guided learning and implementing exercising your plans and programs.
Once we complete your plan, we’ll take you through the first step of the framework of LPIC™ the Learn phase. This is where we take you and your staff and train how to store, maintain and update your plans properly. Learn more about the LPIC™ framework.
We’ll also take you through your first exercise, tell you what to expect, what to look for as strategies that work, strategies that fall short, and gaps in your plans and how to update them.
We’ll also tell you the best times to make changes and updates to your plans so that maintenance will be easy. Alternatively, we can also implement a maintenance program for you where we will come in to update and conduct exercises for you.
Ready to Get Started?
Schedule a consultation to discuss how we can help your medical practice become more resilient, build Operational Endurance™ and create a truly Enduring Medical Practice™ by Building Your Resilience Planning for Healthcare Practitioners and Their Practices.
Learn More About Erwood Group
At Erwood Group, our team has experienced various disasters and events that have disrupted businesses. That’s given us first-hand experience on how to properly prepare for and navigate any circumstance. We use that information to protect our businesses, giving them the tools they need to succeed.
How Is Erwood Group Different?
As our Co-Founder Keith Erwood says, “How aren’t we different, we’re different in every way.” First, we’ll NEVER turn away a call for help or tell you to “Just follow the plan” as most of our competitors do, just when you need us most and expect us to be a partner.
We’re experienced crisis managers and contingency planners and we’ll be there when you need us to get you through a crisis.
Though our strategies, plans, programs and training are robust, we know that not every crisis, business or person is the same or experienced at handling a crisis. You should be able to call on us when the unknown and unexpected happens.
When doubt, uncertainty or even panic strikes, we’ll be the beacon, the calm of the storm by your side when a crisis hits. We can stand with you, side-by-side, offer guidance and advise you from behind the scenes, run your teams if you need us.
Work with us, make Erwood Group your Partner in Preparedness and we’re just a phone call away.
Benefits of working with Erwood Group
Working with Erwood Group to create your resilient and Enduring Medical Practice™ has many benefits including but not limited to:
- Increased positive patient outcomes and reductions in negative patient outcomes
- Enhanced patient trust
- Increased workforce and staffing efficiency
- Increased capabilities of your practice and staff
- Increased trust among staff
- Increase in resilience
- Increased insurance coverage and potential reductions in premium costs
- Minimizing consequences of downtime following disasters and disruptive events
- Fewer impacts and revenue losses from disruptive events
- Fewer revenue delays from disruptive events
- Reduced legal risks
- Regulatory compliance
- Positioning your medical practice as a trusted and reliable healthcare provider
- Meet HIPAA, PCI DSS, HHS, NIH, Joint Commission, Federal and State healthcare standards
More About Preparedness and Resilience in Healthcare
Medical Practitioners, Clinics, Hospitals, all Healthcare facilities and practitioners are required to have preparedness, business continuity and disaster recovery planning in place. You can read this article to learn more about Business Continuity in Healthcare.
With Erwood Group you can rest assured that your strategies and plans will work when they are activated and you can count on us to be there when you need us. Ready to begin Building Your Resilience Planning for Healthcare Practitioners and Their Practices? Need immediate assistance – call us 1-877-565-8324.
Ready to Talk?