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This is the second of a three-part series covering the top five issues that lead to malpractice claims in the ED and how you can address them. The January 2004 issue of ED Management addressed chest pain, and this months installment involves headache and abdominal pain.
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If you already are working to optimize the care of cardiac patients in your ED, seeking accreditation as a chest pain center can be a good way to draw attention to your efforts, improve capacity, and make sure you maintain those standards over time.
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Jon Huddy, managing principal of FreemanWhite, a Charlotte, NC-based firm that specializes in health care facility design, offers these tips for surviving construction in your ED.
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Sooner or later, your emergency department will be the site of some type of construction project, whether it is a full-scale renovation or a relatively small repair job. If you think your ED is hectic now, just imagine a bunch of construction workers tearing out walls with sledgehammers and sawing lumber while your physicians and staff try to continue with patient care.
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Delay in treatment remains the most common cause of sentinel events in EDs, accounting for more than half of all sentinel events originating in EDs since the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations began tracking the events in 1995.
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Your ED is geared toward delivering acute care to sick or injured patients, but hospitals that aspire to earning disease-specific care (DSC) certification are requiring their EDs to take a fresh look at how they treat patients with chronic illnesses.
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The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced an interim final rule to identify and compensate ED staff and others injured as a result of receiving a smallpox vaccine.
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More than a year after implementation of the Medicare outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS), there are unexpected variances in the assignment of evaluation and management (E&M) codes on claims from EDs, suggesting many are undercoded or overcoded and may risk compliance charges.
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To explain how EDs often leave themselves open for liability when treating headaches, Diane M. Sixsmith, MD, MPH, FACEP, chairman of emergency medicine at New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens in Flushing, tells a story, based on a real incident, in which everything went wrong.
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One part of the special cardiac care program that helped Florida Hospital in Orlando receive accreditation as a chest pain center is the Code STEMI program. Code STEMI stands for segment elevation myocardial infarction and results in the patient being transported quickly from the ED to the catheterization lab.
