Practical HRO: Optimizing Operational Risk Management using High Reliability Organizing Edward J Tierney

This podcast is part of our HRO and Healthcare focus. The episode features Sheeva Azma, founder of Fancy Comma and a freelance science, technology, health, policy, and business journalist. Her investigative journalism introduced her to High Reliability Organizing and how it can help overcome bias, racism, and burnout in healthcare workers.

Sheeva's research highlights the impact of Covid and Long Covid on patients, doctor's decisions, and burnout amongst health care staff. Improving and planning against this impact, HRO can help organizations make changes to their cultures to reduce the impact and improve the work environment.

Sheeva also has a relationship with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. This organization is focused on patient safety in a variety of healthcare settings and situations. Like Sheeva the Patient Safety Foundation is committed to Zero Harm.

In this episode we explore the need for operational risk management by startups. I'm joined by Mr. Rick Gardener, executive director of the University of Buffalo's Business and Entrepreneurship Partnerships office. Rick has experience in all types of business settings from startups to NFPs. He holds 32 patents and brings a risk management perspective to his work.

When you talk about risk management for startups, Rick introduces the idea of moving from "the land of possibility" to a more firm perspective...  identifying the actual risks that are going to get in the way of bringing your product to market. This is often a challenge for founders, and may be especially applicable for tech startups.  

Rick sees an additional challenge for technical startups. The bulk of their work and thinking has been technical in nature. While it's important to overcome the technical obstacles, it is equally important to understand and plan for commercialization challenges.

Rick has some awesome insights and offers some best practices on dealing with risk and commercialization for startups.

Joining us in this episode is Dr. David O’Rourke, District Superintendent and CEO of Erie2 BOCES, a cooperative education service that works directly with school districts to offer needed special services for students and schools. 

We’re going to talk with David about managing risk in the middle of a crisis.  A crisis no one saw coming.  

We look at the operational, personnel, and student risks that had to be overcome, and we’re going to get some insight into how we can use this crisis as an opportunity for our schools. HRO requires that we learn from crisis and we are certainly going to need to incorporate HRO principles in our learning systems and facilities. David has a good start on that, having created an ad-hoc HRO organization in the midst of a raging crisis. Hat’s off to him and his team!

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to teach a class of Healthcare graduate students about HRO. I'm excited to bring this to the podcast. To make it manageable I divided this 90 minute introductory class up into a 3 Part Series.

This Episode is Part 3. It  introduces some of the human-centric aspects of HRO and what is important in implementing  HRO concepts.

Part 1 Takes class through a bit of history about HRO, as this gives important context as to why it's important an what it's about. From there the class learns the definition of HRO and we break that down to focus on the various aspects of HRO.
Part 2 I take the  the class through the  5 Habits of HRO, define them and look at some practical aspects of them.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to teach a class of Healthcare graduate students about HRO. I'm excited to bring this to the podcast. To make it manageable I divided this 90 minute introductory class up into a 3 Part Series.

This Episode is Part 2. I take the  the class through the  5 Habits of HRO, define them and look at some practical aspects of them.

Part 1 Takes class through a bit of history about HRO, as this gives important context as to why it's important an what it's about. From there the class learns the definition of HRO and we break that down to focus on the various aspects of HRO.
Part 3 introduces some of the human-centric aspects of HRO and what is important in implementing  HRO concepts.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to teach a class of Healthcare graduate students about HRO. I'm excited to bring this to the podcast. To make it manageable I divided this 90 minute introductory class up into a 3 Part Series.

This Episode is Part 1. I take the class through a bit of history about HRO, as this gives important context as to why it's important an what it's about. From there the class learns the definition of HRO and we break that down to focus on the various aspects of HRO.

Part 2 Takes the 5 Habits of HRO and defines them and looks at some practical aspects of them. Part 3 introduces some of the human-centric aspects of HRO and what is important in implementing  HRO concepts.