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If youre feeling bad because your organization has not yet adopted the Leapfrog Groups ambitious campaign to improve patient safety in hospitals, youre not alone.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson announced recently that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is issuing a final rule requiring bar codes on the labels of thousands of human drugs and biological products. The measure will help protect patients from preventable medication errors and reduce the cost of health care, he says.
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What does Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) say about false labor? If the patient is in false labor, it seems that EMTALA does not apply. But what is required to determine that it is indeed false labor and not true labor?
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A university hospital harvested and stored 28 embryos for a couple who had been unsuccessful in conceiving a child. Ten years later, the hospital disposed of the embryos, believing that the failure on the part of the couple to respond to notices that the hospital was going to take such action indicated their concurrence to have the embryos destroyed. When the couple later sought to have the embryos implanted, they were no longer available, and they sued the providers.
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Health Privacy Project executive director Janlori Goldman said that
while many glitches and misinterpretations of the HIPAA privacy
regulation have been resolved, others remain and should be addressed by
the Department of Health and Human Services or Congress.
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A San Francisco hospital is taking the Universal Protocol so seriously that it has threatened to suspend entire operative teams the surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurses, and anyone else in the room if the procedures to prevent wrong-site surgery are not followed.
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Enterprise liability is a legal concept that some advocates say can help health care organizations achieve patient safety, but it could represent another reason for risk managers to worry.
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Can we collect insurance information after triage in the emergency department but before the medical screening examination? We hear conflicting explanations about whether this violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.
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In a special Dear Colleague letter aimed at risk managers and other hospital leaders, the Food and Drug Administration warns that some electrically powered hospital beds may pose a risk of fire.
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The labor and delivery department may be where the risk of infant abductions is greatest, but it is far from the only area of the hospital needing a risk managers attention. Children are often taken from other areas of the hospital that may not receive as much attention.