George Breen Quoted in Article "Be Aware of False Claims Exposure with Root Cause Analysis"

The potential discovery of RCA contents has always been a concern, and that concern is a primary reason healthcare risk managers sometimes don't get as much out of the process as they could, says George B. Breen. He works closely with risk managers who use RCA to address adverse events and other issues in their facilities, but he is sometimes disappointed that they did not achieve the end result: effectively determining the foundation of how and why an event came to pass. ...

One way to protect your RCA from prying eyes is to follow a set of clearly defined procedures conducting the analysis, Breen says. The goal is to establish in your policies and procedures, as clearly as possible, that you intend this process as a "true self-look at what it is we are or are not doing," Breen says. ...

"It's fine to say that your analysis revealed this problem, but you want to have auditing and follow-ups to ensure that the lesson you just learned was not held in isolation," Breen says.

"You want to be able to show that you took something from that lesson and changed your practice so that you can avoid that exposure in the future." ...

"I don't think that the False Claims Act exposure here is on the radar of most risk managers," Breen says. "The issue of peer review might be more known by them, depending on their state, but the false claims exposure has the potential for being much more damaging. That's why you need to have a well thought-out plan for how you conduct an analysis and a plan for protecting it that goes beyond just calling it peer review."