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At the University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) in Seattle, educators ask inpatients how they prefer to learn and document that information on the electronic medical record, when there is no protocol for accommodating the patients' preferences. These actions are futile, members of the Patient and Family Education Committee complain.
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A patient should be educated with several topics when diagnosed with asthma, says Marc Riedl, MD, assistant professor of medicine, Division of Clinical Immunology and Allergy at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. They include the following:
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Effective communication is critical to the successful delivery of healthcare services. The Joint Commission supports a number of efforts to improve communication between healthcare professionals and patients.
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Unlike the current privacy rule which identifies purposes that might be omitted from disclosure accounting reports, the proposed rule published on May 31, 2011, identifies those purposes for which disclosures must be tracked and reported.
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Improved technology is creating an obligation for healthcare providers to recover patient data soon after a disaster, says Gary L. Kaplan, JD, an attorney with the law firm of Thorp Reed & Armstrong in Pittsburgh.
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Compliance and regulatory officers have until Aug. 1 to comment on a proposed rule that includes a new accounting of disclosures provision that gives individuals the right to receive a report on who has electronically accessed their protected health information (PHI).
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued an interim final rule to adopt the first two in a series of "operating rules" that will standardize the HIPAA standards for electronic administrative/financial transactions.
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When an EF-5 tornado, among the biggest ever recorded, hit St. John's Regional Medical Center in Joplin, MO, the damage was so severe that all the patients had to be evacuated and taken to other hospitals outside the community. Their medical records were accessible, however, and the hospital was providing care again within a week, all because the hospital had adopted electronic health records (EHRs) only weeks before the disaster.
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Crico Strategies, the medical malpractice company owned by and serving the Harvard medical community in Cambridge, MA, recommends these remedies for the common causes of obstetrics (OB) claims:
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A 34-year-old nursing student complaining of headaches presented at a local university hospital. Diagnostic testing showed a small aneurysm. During a procedure intended to repair the aneurysm, the woman's brain was pierced.
