Enabling effective oversight: Enterprise risk management and board governance in healthcare

Lengthy emergency room wait times leaving patients waiting for essential care. Dwindling annual budgets putting core services at risk. Cyberattacks resulting in ransomed data. These are just some of the ever-present risks in the healthcare sector. Each of these risks has a potential for high likelihood of occurrence, impact, and velocity. Identifying, assessing, mitigating, and reporting risk are therefore crucial to Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), and should be built into healthcare institutional processes. This column provides some recommendations for health leaders on how to enable effective oversight through ERM.