Abstract for: A System Dynamics Model for the Clinical Risk Management: a preliminary analysis

Clinical risk management has gained an increasing relevance because of the higher monetary and no monetary effects of clinical errors on healthcare companies’ performance. For this reason, different risk management techniques from the industrial sector have been adopted by managers of healthcare companies in order to reduce the occurrences of errors and their relative impacts. Although the reduction of clinical errors obtained by adopting clinical risk management techniques have been widely described, in most of developed countries such policies are not very widespread. Such circumstance can be explained by the costs healthcare companies have to bear to invest in clinical risk management in order to improve their risk profile. In fact, these techniques, based on a linear and static perspective, do not properly support the healthcare companies’ management in the identification and assessment of policies aimed at improving the clinical risk profile without reducing financial performances. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a systemic and multidimensional approach that supports cost-and-benefit analysis of the identified policies. Based on preliminary results of a research project on system dynamics methodology applied to clinical risk management in Italian healthcare companies, some peculiar aspects are analyzed and discussed.