A looming shortage of healthcare risk managers needs to be addressed by engaging the interest of the younger generation. That is the view of Douglas Borg, director of insurance and associate director for clinical risk management for Duke University Health System, who is now in his fifth year of involvement in the Spencer Educational Foundation’s risk manager in residence program.
This year Borg will be risk manager in residence at Olivet College in Michigan, where he aims to inspire students to consider healthcare risk management as a career.
“My goal in participating is to introduce the concept of healthcare risk management as a career path,” he said. “Most of these students focus on insurance or other industries and there’s not a lot of attention paid to our small corner of the risk management universe. It’s always an amazing experience for me to interact with the students and faculty while sharing with them how the healthcare industry benefits from our work.”
Borg will spend two to three days on campus, where he will teach classes, meet with faculty, and frequently address local student and professional organizations. “It’s a busy few days, but it’s always exciting and very fulfilling for me to see how excited these young adults are about risk management and insurance as a career,” he said.
He added that healthcare risk management as an industry is facing a dearth of risk managers as baby boomers start retiring over the next few years.
“We’re going to be losing an incredible amount of experience and knowledge and there’s going to be this tremendous gap as these people start to retire. How do we get some young people interested and coming into our field?
“The difficult thing is there is no clear career path into healthcare risk management. That’s something that we need to work on as an industry, helping to develop much more clear paths for these kids who want to get involved in healthcare risk management – but the first step is making them aware that this is an interesting career path.”
risk manager, shortages, Douglas Borg
