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Improving communication among doctors, nurses and patients can help reduce medical errors, but doing so sometimes means making sure that strategy triumphs over culture.

A listing of some of the nation's top publicly traded healthcare companies, their risk managers, brokers, captives and risk management programs.

For insurers, the long-term-care industry is a worthwhile risk again. Loss figures are down, so new capacity is rolling in. But some facilities believe they're better off living independently--risk management or not.

Litigation is not the answer for medical-malpractice cases, so hospitals have turned old practices on their head in search of new solutions. The result is to simply say, "Sorry."

Healthcare risk management is in part driven by accreditation and certification standards, which in the United States are developed by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, an independent, not-for-profit organization located in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.

ASHRM is the organization to participate in if you're a healthcare risk manager. RIMS is great for an overall risk management perspective, but, really, healthcare is its own separate universe--and a big one at that, with its own separate galaxies of acute care, senior care, ambulatory care, therapy, etc.--so it needs its own risk management institution to address its specific current issues and emerging risks.