| Course | NR 706 Healthcare Informatics & Information Systems |
|---|---|
| Week | 7 |
| Paper type | Risk and contingency memo |
| Length | About 810 words, 4 pages |
| Format | Memo with APA 7 citations |
| School | Chamberlain University |
| Program | MSN, Nursing Informatics |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for NR 706 Week 7
Memorandum
To: Information technology steering committee
From: DNP student, clinical informatics
Date: 4 March 2027
Re: Risks and contingencies for the clinical communication platform
Scale
The memo uses the system's own scale so the committee can compare these risks with others it has already accepted. Likelihood and impact use the system's enterprise risk scale: 1 (rare or minor) to 5 (almost certain or severe). Risks are ordered by impact first.
The Register
Seven risks, each with the same fields so they can be compared. 1. An alarm is routed to the wrong phone or not delivered, and a deteriorating patient is not attended. Lands on: patients and nurses. Likelihood 2, impact 5. Advance action: alarms continue to sound at the bedside and at the central station during and after go-live; routing rules for each unit are tested with simulated alarms and approved by the alarm subcommittee before go-live. Fallback: the unit reverts to central-station relay by phone until the fault is fixed. Owner: chief nursing informatics officer.
2. Cutover fails at a hospital and the platform must be reversed. Lands on: all clinicians at that hospital. Likelihood 2, impact 4. Advance action: go-live one hospital at a time, with pagers kept active for six months after the last go-live. Fallback: pagers and landlines resume immediately; the go-live date moves. Owner: project director.
3. The vendor is acquired, discontinues the product or fails. Lands on: the whole system. Likelihood 2, impact 4. Advance action: contract requires 18 months' notice of discontinuation, source code escrow and export of message records in a standard format at no extra charge. Fallback: move to the record vendor's chat module, scored second in the selection analysis. Owner: chief information officer.
4. Renewal is repriced beyond the budget cycle. Lands on: the operating budget. Likelihood 3, impact 3. Advance action: contract caps renewal increases at 5% a year for two renewals. Fallback: renegotiate or plan exit in the year before renewal. Owner: vice president of finance.
5. Wi-Fi coverage gaps leave phones without signal in stairwells and basements. Lands on: nurses and transport staff. Likelihood 3, impact 3. Advance action: remediation in summer 2027 and a walk-test of every unit before go-live. Fallback: cellular data mode and landlines in affected areas. Owner: director of infrastructure, who will report coverage by unit before each go-live.
6. Alerts add to alarm fatigue, and nurses begin muting or ignoring them. Lands on: patients and nurses. Likelihood 3, impact 3. Advance action: each unit's alert set reviewed for non-actionable alarms before go-live; alert volumes per nurse per shift reported monthly. Fallback: the alarm subcommittee removes or delays non-actionable alerts within two weeks. Owner: alarm subcommittee chair. Alarm fatigue is a recognized patient safety risk (Sendelbach & Funk, 2013).
7. A device is lost with patient information on it. Lands on: patients' privacy and the system's compliance. Likelihood 4, impact 2. Advance action: device management with remote wipe, passcodes and no local storage of messages. Fallback: remote wipe within one hour of a report. Owner: information security officer. Low impact because messages are not stored on the device, but frequent enough that the help desk process must be in place on day one.
Risks Considered and Not Listed
Staff resistance to carrying phones, which the working group judged low because nurses already carry unit phones on some units. Integration failure with the record, which would reduce patient context but not stop messaging, and is covered by risk 2's fallback. Unexpected cost growth beyond renewal, covered by the renewal cap. Each was considered and judged either low or already covered, and is recorded here so that the committee knows it was not overlooked. New clinical systems tend to surprise their owners in places no register anticipated (Ash et al., 2004), which is why the register will be reviewed every quarter during the first year.
Contract Terms as Risk Controls
Risks 3 and 4 are controlled mainly by the contract, not by operations. Discontinuation notice, escrow, export rights and a renewal cap are worth more than any operational plan for those risks, and they must be negotiated before signing.
Every Risk Has a Name
Ownership is what turns a list of worries into a register. Each owner has seen and accepted their entry. Unowned risks are not on the register, because a risk without an owner is not managed.
What Remains
After all controls, the residual risk the committee is asked to accept: a rare routing failure during a busy shift before a fault is noticed, mitigated but not eliminated by bedside and central alarms; and the possibility that the platform increases nurses' interruptions, as smartphone studies have found (Wu et al., 2011), which the monthly alert reports will show. The committee is asked to accept these residual risks explicitly, in its minutes, so that the decision record shows they were known.
References
Ash, J. S., Berg, M., & Coiera, E. (2004). Some unintended consequences of information technology in health care: The nature of patient care information system-related errors. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 11(2), 104-112. https://doi.org/10.1197/jamia.M1471
Sendelbach, S., & Funk, M. (2013). Alarm fatigue: A patient safety concern. AACN Advanced Critical Care, 24(4), 378-386. https://doi.org/10.4037/nci.0b013e3182a903f9
Wu, R., Rossos, P., Quan, S., Reeves, S., Lo, V., Wong, B., Cheung, M., & Morra, D. (2011). An evaluation of the use of smartphones to communicate between clinicians: A mixed-methods study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(3), e59. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.1655
What the NR 706 Week 7 assignment asks for
Keep the memo short and order risks by consequence, not by likelihood or alphabet. Name each event concretely and say who it lands on. Give likelihood and impact using whatever scale your organization already uses. For each, set out the action taken in advance and the fallback if it happens anyway. Cover what executives ask about: a cutover failing and having to reverse, a vendor acquired or gone, a renewal repriced beyond the budget cycle. Treat contract terms as risk controls. Attach a named owner to every risk. Say which risks you considered and left off, and state what risk remains after the controls. List risks you considered and left off.
How this NR 706 Week 7 example is built
The sample rates alarm misrouting at likelihood 2 and impact 5, controlled by keeping bedside and central alarms and testing each unit's rules, with a fallback to central relay. Cutover failure is handled by one hospital at a time and six months of pager overlap. Vendor failure is covered by 18 months' notice, escrow and free export, with the record vendor's module as fallback. Renewal is capped at 5%, Wi-Fi gaps get a walk-test, alarm fatigue gets monthly alert volume reports and lost devices get remote wipe. Staff resistance and integration failure are considered and not registered. The residual risk of a rare routing fault is stated for the committee to accept. The committee is asked to accept residual risks explicitly in its minutes.
NR 706 Week 7 rubric: what full points look like
Risk memos lose most when they list risks alphabetically or by likelihood, burying the one that could harm a patient. Next are risks described vaguely, such as technical issues, with no event or affected group named. Many memos give advance actions but no fallback for when the risk happens anyway. Contract terms are often left out, though they are the main control for vendor and pricing risks. Risks without a named owner tend not to be managed. Memos that hedge every rating or never state residual risk leave the committee unsure what it is accepting, which graders and executives both notice. Memos that never list risks considered and left off also invite the question of whether they were overlooked.
Common NR 706 Week 7 mistakes, and how to avoid them
A risk memo is short, but ordering risks by consequence and attaching owners and fallbacks takes care. Working from your design and contract terms, we can name each event concretely, rate it on your organization's scale and set out advance actions and fallbacks. We can also help you identify contract controls and state the residual risk. Asking each prospective owner to read their entry is the best test of whether the memo is usable. The register is yours. Listing risks considered and left off is worth doing too.
Get a NR 706 Week 7 example written to your instructions
Send us the assignment prompt, the rubric and any scenario your section supplied, and a custom NR 706 Week 7 memo gets written to those materials and returned inside 24-48h, the first one free. Setting a finished register beside your own is the quickest way to see which risks you left without an owner.
More NR 706 papers and MSN samples
- NR 706 Week 1: Governance Bodies Post
- NR 706 Week 2: Governance Critique
- NR 706 Week 3: System Selection Analysis
- NR 706 Week 4: Cost of Ownership Brief
- NR 706 Week 5: Business Case
- NR 706 Week 6: Strategic Alignment
- NR 706 Week 8: Executive Proposal Paper
- NR 512 Week 7: Documentation Case Analysis
- NR 643 Week 7: Presentation Script
- NR 515 Week 7: Integration Proposal, Consult Notes
- NR 642 Week 7: Baseline Measurement Plan
NR 706 Week 7 questions, answered
How many risks belong in the memo?
Fewer than students list, argued harder. Six to ten well-specified entries carrying owners, triggers and fallbacks beat thirty generic ones, and a long register signals that the writer sorted nothing. Where a section sets a number, follow it, and use the ordering to make sure whatever a board would ask about first appears first.
Should the memo include clinical risk or only technical risk?
Both, because an executive reader does not separate them. A failed interface is a technical event and a missed result is a clinical one, and the memo gets stronger when it follows the chain from the first into the second. What keeps it disciplined is stating the clinical consequence specifically rather than gesturing at patient safety generally.
How do I score likelihood without data?
Use a defined scale, say what each level means, then justify placements from published experience with comparable implementations. Honest reasoning on a stated scale reads better than a probability figure with no derivation behind it. Where an organizational scale exists, use that one, because a memo scored privately cannot be compared with anything else the board holds.
Where can I find a free NR 706 Week 7 sample paper?
The finished risk and contingency memo for a clinical communication platform is available here in full.
Which risk comes first in the NR 706 Week 7 memo, and why?
Alarm misrouting, because an alarm reaching the wrong phone could leave a deteriorating patient unattended, the most severe consequence on the register.