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It happened six months later than first expected, but on July 1 organizations became responsible for meeting the requirements of the standards for patient-centered communications, Advancing Effective Communication, Cultural Competence, and Patient- and Family-Centered Care: A Roadmap for Hospitals. An exception was the visitation standards, which went into effect July 1, 2011.
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It's been 17 years since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed into law, but despite that, there are still plenty of organizations that aren't complying with its rules and are ending up paying millions in fines for their errors.
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Three years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American College of Surgeons (ACS) each brought a proposal to the National Quality Forum (NQF) related to measuring surgical-site infections.
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If a genetic test reveals a patient is at high risk for cancer, the ordering physician may think it's important for this information to be shared with others in the family, but the patient may think otherwise.
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Careful stewardship of scarce resources remains an ethical obligation of physicians, but avoiding harm to patients is a higher priority, argues Howard Brody, MD, PhD, John P. McGovern Centennial Chair in Family Medicine and director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
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Low-income patients are less likely to sue physicians than patients with higher incomes, according to an analysis of litigation rates and medical malpractice claims.
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Over half (55%) of physicians told a patient that his or her prognosis was more positive than the medical facts warranted within the previous year, according to a survey conducted in 2009 of almost 2,000 physicians in seven specialties.
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One out of 10 physicians said they had told a patient something untrue in the previous year, according to a 2009 survey of 1,891 practicing physicians nationwide.1
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When physicians were first using the Internet to do e-prescribing back in the 1990s, this led to the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) forming a committee to define a physician-patient relationship, recalls Humayun J. Chaudhry, DO, MS, FACP, FACOI, the FSMB's president and CEO.
