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The State of Tennessee has expanded an existing contract with AT&T to provide the country's first statewide system to electronically exchange patient medical information.
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The National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) says the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should adopt a policy for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) to allow individuals to have limited control, in a uniform manner, over disclosure of certain sensitive health information for purposes of treatment.
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The Government Accountability Office says that even though the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is undertaking a number of activities to pursue President Bush's goal for nationwide implementation of health information technology, it still has not developed a national strategy that defines plans, milestones, and performance measures for reaching the goal of interoperable electronic health records by 2014.
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A woman pregnant with twins delivered her first baby without incident, but then experienced complications as she was in the process of delivering the second baby. The second baby was experiencing cord prolapse, and his heart rate plummeted. The physician continued to attempt to deliver the second baby vaginally for 10 minutes, but she eventually called for a cesarean. Fifteen minutes later, the baby was born and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy.
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A health provider in Los Angeles that frequently treats celebrities announced recently that it had failed to protect the privacy of singer Britney Spears, and it wasn't the first time.
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As part of his efforts to educate the public about heart health, Frederick Meadors, MD, a cardiothoracic surgeon at St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center in Little Rock, AR, had planned to perform heart surgery on a patient while 330 people watched the procedure live through a video feed in a hospital auditorium.
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A government laptop computer containing sensitive medical information on 2,500 patients enrolled in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study was stolen in February, according to a recent report in The Washington Post.
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This is an excerpt from the memorandum sent to all University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), employees at 9:20 a.m. on Jan. 31, 2008, by chief compliance and privacy officer Carole A. Klove:
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Every risk manager worries about the obstetrics unit, where the number of adverse events may be small but the scope of the tragedy and liability can be huge.
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One of the most common threats to patient safety in obstetrics is the inability, or hesitation, of staff to clearly state their concern about a patient's status, says Edmund F. Funai, MD, associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, CT. Too often, one clinician is concerned about a patient but does not effectively communicate that concern to others.
