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A university hospital harvested and stored 28 embryos for a couple who had been unsuccessful in conceiving a child. Ten years later, the hospital disposed of the embryos, believing that the failure on the part of the couple to respond to notices that the hospital was going to take such action indicated their concurrence to have the embryos destroyed. When the couple later sought to have the embryos implanted, they were no longer available, and they sued the providers.
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In a special Dear Colleague letter aimed at risk managers and other hospital leaders, the Food and Drug Administration warns that some electrically powered hospital beds may pose a risk of fire.
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Can we collect insurance information after triage in the emergency department but before the medical screening examination? We hear conflicting explanations about whether this violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.
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Enterprise liability is a legal concept that some advocates say can help health care organizations achieve patient safety, but it could represent another reason for risk managers to worry.
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A San Francisco hospital is taking the Universal Protocol so seriously that it has threatened to suspend entire operative teams the surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurses, and anyone else in the room if the procedures to prevent wrong-site surgery are not followed.
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The HIPAA Conformance Certification Organization says its Common Compliance Assessment Process determined that, on average, the nations leading HIPAA translation and validation vendors agree in their interpretation of compliance 43% of the time, up from an average of 35% on all transactions in 2003.
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The HIPAA Implementation Working Group, a coalition formed to help providers and vendors better understand the process by which the HIPAA electronic standards are developed and modified and to increase provider and vendor representation in that process, has contacted Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Mark McClellan to express concern over a CMS instruction to fiscal intermediaries to reject claims lacking certain data elements not needed by Medicare for claims adjudication.
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Nearly 82 million Americans younger than 65 went without health insurance for all or part of 2002 and 2003, according to a report released recently by Families USA.
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The third stage of an ambitious campaign aimed at streamlining emergency department operations gets under way this month as Baptist Memorial Health Care in Memphis, TN, begins recruiting members for a new ED volunteer corps. Whats unusual about this hospital volunteer initiative is that it is targeted to young people who may be considering jobs in the health care field.
