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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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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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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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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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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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Leaders at Summa Akron (OH) City Hospital took a hard look at elective inductions a couple years ago and didn't like what they found.
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As hospital compliance officers prepare for a proposed increase in patient access to medical records' information, another proposed rule increases access to laboratory results.
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The vulnerabilities of a virtual infrastructure are real, but they often are overlooked while healthcare leaders focus on the return on investment (ROI), says Eric Chiu, founder & president of HyTrust, a company in Mountain View, CA, that specializes in access control for data.
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Authorities in Kissimmee, FL, report that a teenager has been arrested and accused of impersonating a physician's assistant (PA) in a local hospital's emergency department (ED).
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Beginning Jan. 1, 2012, providers must use the new HIPAA 5010 transaction standards to conduct certain administrative transactions such as claims, remittance, eligibility and others, but not all providers are ready for the transition to new standards, and that lack of preparedness could affect transition to ICD-10 as well.
