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Take two aspirin and e-mail in the morning creates serious risk
First of two parts on risk and e-mail
E-mail is becoming increasingly common in health care, but chances are your policies and procedures have not kept up with the serious risks that can be created when people send e-mail without stringent safeguards.
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Meghan Dierks, MD, MS, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Clinical Decision Making Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Cambridge, offers an outline of what information should be exchanged in an ideal patient handoff.
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Patient handoff is a high-risk time that many health care workers dont handle as well as they should, cautions Meghan Dierks, MD, MS, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Clinical Decision Making Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Cambridge.
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A new ruling by the Department of Justice (DOJ) sharply limits the governments ability to prosecute people for criminal violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but that may lead prosecutors to hold your organization responsible for those violations instead.
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Two hospitals run by Duke University Health System in North Carolina were cited in a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) report for mistakenly washing surgical instruments in used hydraulic fluid instead of detergent and failed to notice the mix-up for weeks.
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(Editors note: This is the second in a series of articles about the risks of using e-mail in health care. Next months issue will include the third in this series.)
Chances are good that you have a policy on the proper use of e-mail within your organization and when communicating with patients, but it probably is time for an update to keep pace with rapid advances in technology and the way people use e-mail.
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Childrens Memorial Medical Center in Chicago and South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, NY, have instituted a number of strategies to reduce falls among its young patients.
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Pediatric falls require different strategies, not same old thing
Falls among elderly patients are high on the priority list for any risk manager, but what about your patients on the other end of the spectrum? Are you doing all you can to prevent falls among your youngest patients?
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Any effort to reduce surgical infections and their associated costs may run into a formidable hurdle: Operating room teams tend to assume theyre using best practices when theyre actually not.
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Foreign objects retained after surgery now are considered sentinel events.