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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPAC), recently signed into law by President Obama, will affect many areas of concern for risk managers.
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News: At birth, a baby boy was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect preventing blood flow to his lungs. Two days later, a B-T shunt was placed, and the child was discharged a few days later.
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News: A 76-year-old retired butcher and truck driver with dementia was admitted to a nursing home. During the man's stay, he suffered from dehydration and also developed several bedsores requiring hospitalization.
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Reprocessing of single-use devices is becoming increasingly popular among U.S. health care organizations, which are drawn to the potential cost savings and, more recently, the effort to go green by reducing waste. But do those benefits bring liability risks?
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The federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Washington, DC, announced recently that it will strengthen its oversight of three of the most potent forms of medical radiation, including computed tomography (CT) scans.
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If providers worry that The Joint Commission (TJC) will release their accreditation records to prosecutors, they may become reluctant to share sensitive information with the accrediting body, cautions Vickie Patterson, an associate director in the Atlanta office of Protiviti, a risk consulting firm.
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Risk managers expect accreditation records to be confidential, and The Joint Commission (TJC) urges providers to fully disclose information about adverse events and deficiencies as part of the quality improvement process. But some risk managers are learning that those records are not as private as often thought.
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A wave of the "stomach flu" can be like a tsunami of gastrointestinal illness, affecting patients and health care workers alike. It takes vigilant hand hygiene, cleaning, and use of personal protective equipment to control and prevent hospital outbreaks, says Tara MacCannell, PhD, a health care epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.
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Nine years after the Food and Drug Administration approved the first blood test to detect latent tuberculosis infection, hospitals are still struggling to determine how to use the tests or whether to use them at all
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Janine Jagger, PhD, MPH, director of the International Health Care Worker Safety Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, offered this perspective on the new guideline from the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America