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One-fifth of hand surgeons admit they have operated on the wrong site at least once in their careers, according to a new survey. But at the same time, they report that a campaign begun in 1998 by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) to prevent such errors may be showing good results.
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Problems associated with medical litigation have significantly worsened in the past year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which says the spiraling cost of insurance for health care providers is impairing patients access to health care, as well as the cost and quality of care.
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Physicians acted appropriately when they removed Jesica Santillan from life support without the consent of her parents, according to advice offered by an attorney who says such situations can be difficult for risk managers to handle.
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Sentinel events like the transplant error at Duke University Hospital in Durham, NC, often can be traced to a simple human failing by one individual, but risk managers look beyond that to ask how the system allowed the error to go undiscovered.
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Hospitals across the country are taking a hard look at their processes to spot weaknesses similar to those at Duke University Hospital, where a patient died because of a lack of redundancy in the system for matching donated organs.
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Obtaining prescription drugs for patients who cant afford them has been a problem for Athens (GA) Regional Medical Center for the 18 years that Beverly A. Baker, CRC, CCM, has been with the hospital, she says. The situation changed dramatically for the better about a year and a half ago.
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URAC in Washington, DC, recently released a set of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Accreditation standards for public comment. When completed later this year, the new program is intended to help health care organizations display a commitment to fair information practices, and to demonstrate that they have taken the necessary steps to protect health information privacy.
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Question: Does the Joint Commissions standard on spiritual assessment apply only to behavioral health or to all health care settings? What are we expected to do in making this spiritual assessment?
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Clinical pathways often are hailed as a premier quality improvement tool, but they also are seen as pie-in-the-sky solutions because they dont do any good if clinicians dont actually use them after all the fanfare of introducing them.
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A root-cause analysis points to a lack of redundancy as the critical failure that allowed organs to be transplanted into a patient with the wrong blood type, according to information from Duke University in Durham, NC, the site of a recent notorious sentinel event.
