A patient with a history of pregnancy-induced preeclampsia was admitted to the hospital for the delivery of her fourth child. After delivering her child via caesarean section, her physician ordered close monitoring of bleeding, blood pressure, and heart rate. Despite a falling heart rate, rising pulse, and lack of urine output, all classic signs of blood loss shock, a physician was not contacted for several hours.
Driven by concerns about the many risks social media poses, the healthcare industry has been slower than others in adopting social media. However, the rate of adoption has increased in the past two to three years. As of October 2011, more than 1,000 hospitals have recognized the benefits in improved community outreach and are actively using social networking tools, according to ECRI Institute, an independent nonprofit in Plymouth Meeting, PA, that researches approaches to improving patient care.
No one wants to sit through another boring education video, so Long Beach (CA) Memorial Medical Center decided to lighten things up with their fall prevention video.
The risk manager at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles declined to be interviewed about the incident in which a temporary employee posted patient information on Facebook, but the parent company, Providence Health & Services, provided this statement:
These are some key findings from the Second Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy & Data Security released recently by The Ponemon Institute in Traverse City, MI.:
Administrators from all hospitals with reported events indicated that they rely on incident reporting systems to capture a large portion of the information about events that they use to conduct patient safety improvement activities, but they are not capturing most errors, according to a new report by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
According to a recent survey published in the Annals of Surgery, many U.S. surgeons fail to discuss their patients' wishes in case a risky operation goes awry, and even more say that they would not operate if patients limited what could be done to keep them alive. The survey indicates that the restrictions are being debated among doctors.
In the waning days of the comment period for the advance notice of proposed rule-making (ANPRM) for human subjects protection regulation, some of the institutional review board (IRB) community's heavy hitters have weighed in.
The sixth edition of the American College of Physicians' (ACP's) Ethics Manual addresses ethical decisions in clinical practice, teaching, and medical research, as well as the underlying principles and the physician's role in society and with colleagues.
