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The American Hospital Association says the multiplicity of privacy rules from local, state, and federal governments, accrediting bodies, and other organizations makes compliance difficult and can interfere with patient care.
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A pregnant woman with a fetus weighing nearly 10 pounds was admitted to the hospital for induction of labor even though she was never told of her baby's large size or given the option of a cesarean. During delivery, a shoulder dystocia occurred, and the baby suffered permanent Erb's palsy on his left side.
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Health care risk management continues to be a promising career field even as the industry faces challenges.
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A new study shows the number of drug therapy-related deaths and injuries reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) nearly tripled between 1998 and 2005, but exactly what those numbers mean is the subject of some dispute.
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New biotechnology drugs are the culprit in many adverse drug events, and that means risk managers may want to implement stricter controls and require more pharmacist oversight for them, as well as encouraging more education about how to use these often powerful medications.
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Mariko Bird, MD, an anesthesiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, recently studied the malpractice claims related to acute pain management and found 150 cases in the American Society of Anesthesiologists Closed Claims Project database, which has a total of 7,328 closed claims.
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The Chicago Police Department and the patient safety team at the University of Chicago Medical Center are investigating suspiciously high levels of insulin that left two elderly female hospital patients dead and a third in a coma earlier this summer.
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The Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) says it supports development of interoperable electronic personal health records (ePHR) that are interactive and use a common data set of electronic health information and e-health tools.
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A woman who had an ectopic pregnancy and suffered from paranoid schizophrenia went to the hospital complaining of a two-week history of vaginal bleeding. Unable to detect any fetal heart tones or recognize a fetus in utero, an on-call obstetrician/gynecologist discharged the woman. The woman returned to the hospital a couple of days later, but again was discharged when she said she had started to feel better. The woman was subsequently found dead at home.
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When a 43-year-old woman's family and a bystander had to call 911 to seek help for her as she was lying on the floor in the ED at Martin Luther King Jr. — Harbor Hospital in Los Angeles, it was the beginning of the end for the troubled hospital.
