-
Office-based practices face increased legal risks due to more patient care occurring in the ambulatory setting. Physicians often fail to realize that they can be held vicariously liable for the actions of their staff.
-
Physicians have a legal obligation to transfer a patient when the standard of care or the facility's licensure requires it. This documentation can make "failure-to-transfer" claims more defensible:
the criteria for meeting exceptions to transfer requirements; how criteria in policies were met; an appropriate patient plan of care.
-
If physicians fail to purchase "tail" coverage when leaving one carrier, they risk having no coverage if a suit is filed before the effective date of their new carrier's policy.
-
Whether a medical expert is qualified to testify often turns on a particular state statute, says Thomas R. McLean, MD, JD, CEO of American Medical Litigation Support Services in Shawnee, KS.
-
Claims involving routine medical procedures — scopes, injections, punctures, biopsies, insertion of tubes, or imaging — resulted in $215 million in incurred losses, according to an analysis of 1,497 cases. In this study, legal outcomes often hinged on these factors: failure to obtain or document a thorough, voluntary informed consent; lack of appropriate credentials or experience with the procedure; failure to follow published safety policies.
-
-
Rocky Mountain spotted fever is most common in the southeastern United States despite its name. It presents with headache, fever, myalgias, and a vasculitic rash that may involve the palms and soles.
-
Practice guidelines recommend mitral valve repair or replacement for severe ischemic mitral regurgitation (MR) that is causing symptoms refractory to best available medical therapy.
-
At this time, ventricular fibrillation (VF) early after acute myocardial infarction (MI) is not an indication alone for an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) therapy.
-
ECG early repolarization patterns were long thought to be benign normal variants until recent papers purported to show a relationship between these patterns and the risk of malignant arrhythmias and cardiac death.