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The first civil monetary penalty handed down by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has created a buzz throughout the health care industry, and not just because of the eye-popping amount of the fine: $4.3 million.
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The $4.3 million civil monetary penalty imposed on Cignet Health in Temple Hills, MD, could have been avoided by simply responding to the reasonable requests of patients for their own medical records, according to the case laid out by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
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A large hospital system in Massachusetts has agreed to pay $1 million in fines and improve its policies and procedures after an employee left patient information on a subway.
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Nearly 35% of all the imaging costs ordered for 2,068 orthopedic patient encounters in Pennsylvania were ordered for defensive purposes, according to study presented recently at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).
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A woman suffering from personal problems and the subsequent unexpected death of her son was involuntarily committed to a behavioral health center by a psychologist allegedly following a telephone conference in which the woman expressed suicidal ideation. The physician failed to document the specifics of the conversation on the records required for an involuntary commitment.
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Hospital ethics boards now can refer to national guidelines when developing procedural standards and processes for evaluating quality of ethics consultations (EC) and institutional EC processes.
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Hospital ethics committees sometimes are called to handle cases involving donation after cardiac death (DCD), but handling these cases can be a challenge, an expert says.
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Hospitals might improve their ethics consultation processes if they design and use a brief ethics family assessment tool to determine families' and patients' values, two ethicists say.
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Hospital ethics boards seeking a solution for efficiently and effectively documenting and assessing ethics consultation work could find a best practice in the ethics consultation web (ECWeb) program developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in Washington, DC, experts say.
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President Obama's administration reversed its decision to revise a Medicare regulation to include paying physicians to discuss good advance care planning with patients.
