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Risk managers and patient safety experts across the country are catching on to a dangerous trend: Too many physicians and patients are agreeing to early induction or Cesarean sections, they say, and it has to stop.
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Temporary staff members working in a hospital's fast-paced emergency department (ED) are twice as likely as permanent employees to be involved in medication errors that harm patients, according to new research from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. In addition to minimizing the use of temporary staff, the solution, say some experts, is to devote more attention to choosing the temporary staff you do use.
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Elective Cesarean sections and inductions have become much more common in the past three decades, notes Roberta Carroll, ARM, CPCU, MBA, CPCU, CPHQ, CPHRM, senior vice president with Aon Risk Solutions, a consulting firm in Odessa, FL. In 1965, the U.S. cesarean rate was measured for the first time and it was 4.5% (4.5 C‐sections per 100 primary deliveries), Carroll says. In 2002, the C‐section rate was 27% and by 2009 it had increased to 34% of single live deliveries. (Some of these C-sections occurred at 39 weeks or later).
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The malpractice risk associated with early inductions and C-sections is growing, as a direct result of the effort to curb them, says Roberta Carroll, ARM, CPCU, MBA, CPCU, CPHQ, CPHRM, senior vice president with Aon Risk Solutions, a consulting firm in Odessa, FL. To date there have not been many malpractice cases directly related to early inductions and C-sections, but Carroll says that trend is likely to change.
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News: After returning to North Carolina following a trip, a young man presented at his local hospital feeling ill. The man was seen by a physician, and a chest radiograph was ordered. The physician ordering the test and the radiologist interpreting the test noted different findings, and there was later a disagreement as to whether the two physicians met to discuss the contrary findings.
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Imagine the havoc if one day your organization's critical data just ... disappeared.
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A patient of Stanford Hospital & Clinics in Palo Alto, CA, recently alerted the provider to a disturbing find: Detailed medical and billing records for 20,000 of the hospital's patients were posted on a homework help site. Even worse, the records had been posted for nearly an entire year.
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With the increasing usage of temporary staff and physician assistants (PAs) in the emergency department (ED), it is likely that the healthcare industry will see lawsuits alleging their status was key to alleged malpractice, says Paul C. Kuhnel, JD, an attorney with the law firm of LeClairRyan in Roanoke, VA.
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More than 57,000 complaints of Privacy Rule violations were received by the Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) between April 2003 and December 2010. More than 250 large data breaches, defined as those involving the protected health information of more than 500 individuals, occurred in 2009 and 2010.
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Leon Rodriguez, the new leader of the government's HIPAA privacy and security enforcer, last served as chief of staff and deputy assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
