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A 49-year-old woman waits for two hours at Vista Medical Center in Waukegan, IL's ED after reporting chest pain, shortness of breath, and nausea to the triage nurse.
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In tandem with the movement toward electronic medical records, electronic prescribing has gained momentum, most notably with the mandate found in the Medicare Modernization Act to adopt standards by 2008.
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It is reasonably settled that from a legal and/or ethical viewpoint that a competent patient has the right to direct his or her own medical care in any scenario. However, when the patient who is receiving medical care is no longer legally competent or never was legally competent to undertake medical decisions, the legal and ethical waters become murky.
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Ever present in the health care provider's training and practice is the continual responsibility to provide documentation. Although it is ever drummed into our heads that proper documentation is necessary for the purposes of billing, quality assurance, and risk management, documentation is also important in real time for the purposes of communication among caregivers. Not only must each health care practitioner record his/her own activities and findings related to a patient's care, but each practitioner also must take heed of every other provider's documentation.
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In the case of 'Brewster v Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center,' the appellate court of Illinois had to decide whether a hospital owes a duty to a person injured by an off-duty intern suffering from sleep deprivation due to the hospital's policy on working hours.
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With an increasing number of emergency department (ED) physicians using ultrasound, are malpractice lawsuits also on the rise? Quite the contrary, according to proponents of ED ultrasound.
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An ultrasound image shows a patient who had been shot in the chest and was not doing well. The physician thought the patient's lung was collapsed, and he put in a chest tube.
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The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 provides full privilege for information shared with a patient safety organization, with the goal of encouraging voluntary error reporting.
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In the September issue of ED Legal Letter, two common contract clauses - malpractice insurance and restrictive covenants--that can be harmful to the interests of an emergency physician.
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The case of Smith v. Botsford General Hospital contains a number of fascinating aspects and lessons for hospital-based emergency providers.
