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Risk assessment might be a critical strategy to use in your effort to minimize lawsuits, but it shouldn't be the first, says Tom Syzek, MD, FACEP, director of risk management for Dayton, OH-based Premier Health Care Services.
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ED experts agree that when patients feel they have been treated poorly, or that medical mistakes have been made, the most effective way of diffusing the situation and avoiding litigation is to listen carefully to the complaint, admit mistakes if they have been made, and then take concrete action to demonstrate your desire to prevent such mistakes in the future.
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How can an ED manager reduce the risk of lawsuits once problem areas have been identified? Experts agree you've got to get to the root cause of those problems. Sometimes, they say, it might take the use of formal quality improvement tools such as root-cause analysis. Other times, it can be a simple as listening to patient complaints.
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(Editor's note: In this special issue, we highlight an all-important topic: avoiding litigation. We cover issues such as department-level risk assessments, preventive actions to reduce risk; key areas of risk; a three-step strategy for risk management; changes in your department's culture to reduce risk; the use of patient satisfaction as a best practice; best practices and tools for physician, nurses, and other practitioners; admission of mistakes; and the critical role of patient advocates. We know you'll find a host of important strategies to hone your risk management program.)
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Given the complex tasks of the physician scribes at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, CA, you'd think that the technology they use to interface with the department's electronic medical record (EMR) from Cerner Systems would be anything but user-friendly.
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Less than two weeks after instituting a Post-Arrest Hypothermia program for heart attack patients, Providence (CA) Tarzana Medical Center has applied the body-cooling treatment in three cases, and each patient showed remarkable neurologic recovery.
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When the H1N1 virus hit the United States this spring, some EDs were "caught unprepared," according to one emergency medicine expert, and many agree that changes must be made before the virus gains strength this fall, as predicted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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ED managers may find themselves in the spotlight as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has renewed its commitment to scrutinize not-for-profit organizations, which include a large number of hospitals.
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[Editor's note: This is the second column in a two-part series on the relationship between medical decision making and documentation. In the May issue, we covered the key components of medical decision making. This month we address risk as an element of decision-making. This quarterly column on ED coding is written by Caral Edelberg, CPC, CCS-P, CHC, president of Edelberg Compliance Associates in Baton Rouge, LA.]
