ANAHEIM, California — Coping with the threat posed by the Ebola virus is one of many risk management issues on the minds of health care executives.

“Get a flu shot,” Richard Umbdenstock, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, advised health care risk managers when dealing with the Ebola threat, noting that its initial symptoms resemble the flu.

If “there's a textbook case of the value of risk management and risk managers to their health care organization, it's now,” Mr. Umbdenstock said. “It's a particularly challenging and deadly disease that demands a vigilant adherence to protocols,” and no one in a mobile society can risk ignoring it.

Health care organizations must do everything they can to protect patients, staff members and the community, he said during the opening keynote address at the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management's annual conference last month in Anaheim, California.

The Ebola virus is among emerging threats in the health care industry for which captives can be a useful tool in helping to insure and manage the risks, others said during the conference.

Sarah Pacini, vice president of risk management and insurance at Advocate Health Care in Downers Grove, Illinois, said insurance for health care organizations has started to include exclusions for the Ebola virus.

She said health care organizations that use captives might use those alternative risk transfer vehicles to insure Ebola-related liabilities, as well as emerging risks from an increased number of insured patients under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

But Rebecca Havlisch, system vice president of risk management/business health at Banner Health in Phoenix, said health care organizations should consider using captives to insure emerging risks only if they have plans in place to mitigate such issues.

“We have to get back to the basics in managing some of these risks,” Ms. Havlisch said. “Ebola is emergency management. Cyber (is) evolving, but we still have to get back to managing them on a day-to-day basis.”

Another exposure hospital risk managers must face is preventing violence in hospitals, said Carolyn Coleman, Lehigh Valley Health Network's Allentown, Pennsylvania-based director of risk management, who discussed a March 23, 2013, murder-suicide at the network's Allentown hospital.

In discussing lessons learned from the event, Ms. Coleman said one step the hospital system has taken since then is having hospice patients' families answer questionnaires that ask whether there is a gun at home and if other members of the family have been in hospice care.

Training hospital staff to make patients say their name and date of birth before a laboratory specimen is taken and refusing to accept improperly labeled specimens also was suggested as a way to reduce diagnostic errors.

Health care workers were also warned that while electronic medical records can save money and improve outcomes, incorrectly using them can set up significant liability issues.

Marianne DePaulo Plant, a partner at Goodell, Devries, and Leech & Dann L.L.P. in Baltimore, said doctors are not always aware that any medical record changes they make are easily discoverable, yet even the least sophisticated plaintiff attorneys routinely seek the information to prove providers' failure to review the medical records.

In addition, medical record templates “give me more heartburn than any other part of electronic records” because of their ability to fill in the wrong information about a patient, said Craig R. Merkle, a partner at Goodell, DeVries.

Meanwhile, health care risk managers received the good news that hospitals will not face sharply higher professional liability insurance costs next year, said Erik Johnson, the Raleigh, North Carolina-based director of Aon Risk Solutions' global risk consulting unit.

Professional liability claims have been flat, and loss rates are increasing at a modest 2.5% annual rate, which will give health care opportunities “to actually take that flat curve and bend it down” to reduce costs, Mr. Johnson said of the annual study conducted for ASHRM.

Nearly 2,000 people attended this year's ASHRM conference Oct. 26 to 29.

Next year's conference is scheduled for Oct. 18 to 21, 2015, in Indianapolis.