EMTALA Q & A
[Editor’s note: This column is part of an ongoing series that will address reader questions about the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). If you have a question you’d like answered, contact Staci Kusterbeck, Editor, ED Management, 280 Nassau Road, Huntington, NY 11743. Telephone: (631) 425-9760. Fax: (631) 271-1603. E-mail: [email protected].]
Question: For our psychiatric transfers, the receiving facility generally accepts the patients via an authorizing staff person. Does a physician at our facility have to speak with a physician at the receiving facility?
Answer: Not necessarily, according to Jonathan D. Lawrence, MD, JD, FACEP, an ED physician and medical staff risk management liaison at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, CA. The reason is that the receiving staff person has spoken with a physician or is operating under protocols approved by the hospital staff. EMTALA applies if the ED is providing care, period, he says. "Either way, it meets the requirement that the receiving facility be contacted and approve the transfer," Lawrence says.
Each hospital has the right to designate a person, or class of people, capable of accepting patients in transfer, he adds. "One is not likely to see an investigation by the inspector general of a facility that accepts a patient but violates its own bylaws in the process," he says. "There would be no one to bring such an incident to the inspector general’s attention."
Physician-to-physician contact should be made when possible as patient care is best served when this is done, Lawrence adds. "But, as I have noted, this is not a requirement," he says.
Question: For our psychiatric transfers, the receiving facility generally accepts the patients via an authorizing staff person. Does a physician at our facility have to speak with a physician at the receiving facility?
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