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Treatment of severe hypertension in today's busy emergency departments can be confusing and a large source of medical liability.
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The scenario of a resident physician who is involved in a medical malpractice case occurs more commonly than you might think in the day-to-day practice of emergency medicine.
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Low back pain (LBP) is a common (more than 3 million ED visits per year in the United States) yet typically benign ED complaint.
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A 15-year-old girl's mother demands that you give her daughter a pregnancy test, but the child refuses. What do you do?
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Consider this scenario: During a malpractice trial involving a patient's adverse outcome in your ED, the jury learns that you've been in the habit of accepting expensive dinners and vacations from drug companies.
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Increasing numbers of EDs are implementing electronic medical records (EMRs), including computerized physician order entry (CPOE), with the goal of improving patient safety. However, not much is known about the liability risks of these new tools.
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently proposed changes to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) regulations that would allow "community call" programs to be established by groups of hospitals in self-designated referral areas to help address the shortage of ED on-call specialists.
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Crowding is increasingly becoming a factor in litigation involving emergency department care, putting nurses and physicians at increased risk for being named in a lawsuit.
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Controversy continues to swirl around the appropriateness of emergency physicians writing holding orders (or bridge orders, as they are sometimes called) for admitted patients.
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In April of this year the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed changes to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) regulations that would once again significantly impact EMTALA's patient transfer rules.
