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  • Off-Label Prescribing: What Are the Medical-Legal Risks?

    You are treating a patient that you feel would be a good candidate for 'Drug X.' Unfortunately, 'Drug X' is not indicated by the FDA for the treatment of that specific condition; and, you are unable to find prescribing information regarding the optimal dose or duration of therapy with 'Drug X' for that condition. You realize that your use of 'Drug X' in this circumstance would be considered "off-label." What legal risks, if any, might you face?
  • ED physicians more often sued for not giving tPA for stroke

    Emergency physicians are much more likely to be sued for not administering tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) to stroke patients, than for giving the drug, says a new study.
  • Full May 1, 2008 Issue in PDF

  • What if it's not safe to give tPA in your hospital?

    Before giving a stroke patient tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), you must consider not only whether the patent is a candidate, but also whether the setting is appropriate, says Edward Jauch, MD, MS, assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine at University of Cincinnati and a member of the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Stroke Team.
  • E-mail leaves "paper trail" lawyers may utilize

    Imagine this e-mail from one of your colleagues being Exhibit A at your malpractice trial: "You misdiagnosed Jane Doe with indigestion last night and she showed up this morning on my shift with a heart attack and didn't live. Since this is your third time to miss this sort of thing, you really need to pay better attention."
  • Occ health programs and key business objectives

    This is the second part of a three-part series on using financial data to demonstrate the value of occupational health programs. This month, we explore how to show that occupational health programs impact business objectives.
  • Part-time and temporary workers are at much higher risk for injury illness

    If an employee is morbidly obese, drug-impaired, or chronically sleep-deprived, you would probably suspect that this individual is at greater risk for injury or illness in the workplace. But what if the worker is part-time or hired on a temporary basis?
  • Study: Employees don't know their cholesterol levels

    One in six Americans, which is almost 36 million people, have never had their cholesterol checked, according to new statistics from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
  • Bioterror drill goes awry, lab workers are exposed

    An exercise designed to test laboratory readiness for a bioterrorism incident turned into a real-life disaster of another sort when specimen mislabeling and flagrant breaches in infection control resulted in several exposures to an attenuated vaccine strain of Brucella abortus RB51, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports (CDC).
  • Poor TST readings lead to false positives

    In the world of tuberculosis screening, sometimes an unfortunate series of events leads down the path toward inappropriate treatment. Consider this real-life scenario: the antigen had changed; the tuberculin skin test (TST) reader was inexperienced; and the employees, in this case firefighters, were in a low-risk community in Mississippi.