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The American Medical Association recently announced that Massachusetts has become the 20th state in a full-blown medical liability crisis due to its deteriorating medical liability climate and the growing threat of patients losing access to care.
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Outpatient clinic can be OK for injured employees; Diplomacy required when patients want to leave ED
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This case highlights potential concern in the areas of communication, informed consent, appropriate certification, and general risk management protocol.
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What this means to you: This case highlights several causes of preventable hospital errors, including poor communication among staff, overworked or minimally trained workers, a shortage of appropriately trained staff, and a faulty system of checks and balances.
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As of April 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) had received more than 5,000 complaints from individuals about alleged HIPAA privacy violations.
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Even though less than a year remains before the HIPAA security rule takes effect April 21, 2005, many health care organizations are a long way from compliance, according to an assessment by Washington, DC-based URAC, the only organization offering a security accreditation program based directly on the HIPAA security rule.
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The HIPAA Implementation Working Group, a coalition formed to help providers and vendors better understand the process by which the HIPAA electronic standards are developed and modified and to increase provider and vendor representation in that process, has contacted Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Mark McClellan to express concern over a CMS instruction to fiscal intermediaries to reject claims lacking certain data elements not needed by Medicare for claims adjudication.
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The HIPAA Conformance Certification Organization says its Common Compliance Assessment Process determined that, on average, the nations leading HIPAA translation and validation vendors agree in their interpretation of compliance 43% of the time, up from an average of 35% on all transactions in 2003.
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A health care attorney cautions that you should not rush to use liability waivers until you have confirmed that your informed consent processes are the best they can be.
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A Dallas County, TX, jury has awarded an $8 million verdict to a woman and her husband after a group of doctors and other medical professionals failed to diagnose the womans breast cancer for more than a year after she discovered a lump in her breast.