The highly publicized arrest of a Utah nurse for refusing to allow a police request to draw blood on an unconscious patient drew attention to how hospital policies and procedures should protect staff in such confrontations, and particularly the role that in-house police and security officers should play.
The videos showing the arrest of nurse Alex Wubbels are disturbing to many viewers, but especially to risk managers and other healthcare professionals who understand the dilemma faced by a clinician trying to comply with hospital policy and the law when law enforcement demands otherwise.
The University of Utah Hospital continues to refine its policies for encounters with law enforcement, recently rolling out a new policy that requires police to go through the hospital’s customer service office with any request.
The Salt Lake City Police Department conducted two separate investigations of the arrest of nurse Alex Wubbels, RN, and the results echo the reactions of many who have seen the videos.
The Department of Justice’s campaign against healthcare fraud puts hospitals and health systems at risk in many ways, and they could find themselves subject to even greater fraud risk as the 2018 compliance deadline for a new standard of revenue reporting fast approaches.
Healthcare organizations offering telehealth services should expect more scrutiny from the federal government now that the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General has announced plans to review Medicare payments for telehealth services, seeking to confirm the patient was at an eligible originating site and that the statutory conditions for coverage were met.
At first blush, this is a relatively straightforward failure-to-diagnose case, but the essence of this case is that the patient’s cancer would not have been cured in 2004 if the physician had made the proper diagnosis and followed up appropriately, resulting in a defense verdict.