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Thomson American Health Consultants offers the Hospital Handbook on Smallpox Vaccination, a facilitywide resource for the information you need about smallpox vaccination in most health care facilities.
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Translating medical information for patients who dont speak English has always been a difficult issue for health care providers, but evidence is mounting to suggest that health care providers risk major lawsuits from medical errors traced to inadequate translation.
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The National Quality Forum (NQF) announced recently that it had approved 26 safe practices that should be universally utilized in health care to reduce the risk of adverse events. Four additional practices will continue to be evaluated and may be approved in the coming months.
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Recent news reports of patients who lived for months with surgical items mistakenly left in them has spurred the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) to urge that such incidents be reported to the national system it has set up to record such errors.
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There is an extremely high level of confusion, misunderstanding, frustration, anxiety, fear, and anger in a broad range of people and organizations as the April 14 compliance date for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule nears. Thats the finding of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, a statutory public advisory body to the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the area of health data and statistics.
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If youre not moving, start. On April 14, covered entities under HIPAA are expected to be in compliance with the new Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information.
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These tips on improving your translation services are offered by Glenn Flores, MD, director of community outcomes in the department of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and Grena Porto, RN, ARM, DFASHRM, senior director of clinical operations at VHA Inc. in Berwyn, PA, and past president of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management.
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High technology can be a solution to improving your translation services. One example is Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, IL, which recently implemented a system providing audiovisual interpreting services on demand for non-English-speaking or hearing-impaired patients.
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Doctors went on strike recently in several states to protest the malpractice crisis, as President Bush called for significant malpractice reform that would cap damages and rein in the trial attorneys blamed for much of the problem. Californias Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of 1975 (MICRA) could be the solution, some say.
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In a recent lawsuit, a woman accused her doctor of branding his alma maters initials on her uterus during surgery. A legal expert says the crux for risk managers is how the videotape of the surgery both caused the lawsuit and might end it in the doctors favor.
