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This case highlights potential concern in the areas of communication, informed consent, appropriate certification, and general risk management protocol.
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What this means to you: This case highlights several causes of preventable hospital errors, including poor communication among staff, overworked or minimally trained workers, a shortage of appropriately trained staff, and a faulty system of checks and balances.
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As of April 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) had received more than 5,000 complaints from individuals about alleged HIPAA privacy violations.
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Even though less than a year remains before the HIPAA security rule takes effect April 21, 2005, many health care organizations are a long way from compliance, according to an assessment by Washington, DC-based URAC, the only organization offering a security accreditation program based directly on the HIPAA security rule.
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The HIPAA Implementation Working Group, a coalition formed to help providers and vendors better understand the process by which the HIPAA electronic standards are developed and modified and to increase provider and vendor representation in that process, has contacted Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Mark McClellan to express concern over a CMS instruction to fiscal intermediaries to reject claims lacking certain data elements not needed by Medicare for claims adjudication.
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The HIPAA Conformance Certification Organization says its Common Compliance Assessment Process determined that, on average, the nations leading HIPAA translation and validation vendors agree in their interpretation of compliance 43% of the time, up from an average of 35% on all transactions in 2003.
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How many times have you carefully assessed a stroke patient in your ED to determine time of symptom onset, only to find out that this individual is not eligible to receive thrombolytics? New treatment options on the horizon will give you other potentially lifesaving interventions for these patients.
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Its more important than a comfortable waiting room with VCRs and fish tanks, or even an attentive triage nurse. In fact, its often the single most important factor impacting patient satisfaction: door-to-doctor times.
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Is your ED practicing according to current guidelines for trauma patients? Do you need images for use during trauma inservices? The www.trauma.org web site has become an invaluable resource for many emergency nurses.
