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Everyone in health care still is sorting through exactly what the final Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act rule means, and apparently the surveyors working for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are no different.
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Sentinel events at Childrens Hospital Boston have been traced to poor communication between residents and attending physicians, prompting a federal investigation and a plan by the hospital to overhaul how the two groups interact. The hospital is responding to the tragedies with a plan designed to make sure that attending physicians dont leave the younger physicians with too much responsibility by poorly communicating.
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The U.S. District Court in Cheyenne, WY, has awarded $50,000 to a woman stuck by a used needle while visiting a patient at one of Banner Health Systems hospitals in that state. A hospital employee had left the needle lodged in a heat register.
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The University of Illinois Hospital has paid $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit that charged it and two other school-affiliated hospitals with manipulating patients diagnoses to get them new livers.
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While recovering from emergency surgery, a 71-year old patient developed decubitus ulcers acute enough to cause nerve damage and necessitate plastic surgery. The hospital staff and two attending physicians failed to closely monitor the elderly patient during recovery despite his known underlying complications, which included alcohol dependency and heavy smoking.
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A 16-year-old high school football star was in the back seat of a car when the driver lost control and ran off the road. He underwent emergency surgery at a hospital for a ruptured stomach. However, the treating physicians and staff failed to diagnose and treat his fractured spine. The delay in treatment and failure to immobilize the patient resulted in the teen-ager being permanently paralyzed.
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In 1997, the ED at Parkview Hospital in Fort Wayne, IN, was in the 45th percentile in South Bend, IN-based Press Ganey Associates satisfaction rankings. That same year, Southern Ohio Medical Center in Portsmouth, languished in the ninth percentile.
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The ED at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, MN, has been able to increase the percentage of criteria blood draws from 31% to 41% one of the keys to slashing lab specimen turnaround time. But since only a specific percentage of patients meet the criteria at any given time, how is that possible?
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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published a revised survey instrument and proposed administration instructions for the patient perceptions of care survey known as HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Plans).
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