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Recent media coverage showed a dramatic 911 call between an emergency dispatcher and a nurse at a retirement home who refused to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on an elderly woman who was unresponsive.
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New provisions and clarifications in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) omnibus rule might have some hospitals scrambling to determine their compliance level, but it might not be a situation that requires outside help.
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The importance of encryption is emphasized with most of the recent major breaches added to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) list of breaches. Seven of the breaches involved laptops, while the other two involved paper records.
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Protecting the contents of a root cause analysis (RCA) requires much more than slapping a peer review label on the file and assuming that label means it is off limits to prying eyes. Peer review privilege might not protect your RCA at all, but there are other ways to limit the potential downside from someone reading about all your shortcomings.
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Sometimes an IRB director will notice that board members lack interest in evaluation processes. Any attempt to assess how each member is doing might be shuffled to the back burner of the schedules of very busy people.
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The University of California at Berkeleys Consent Builder application relies on the simplified language and template structure previously developed by the institutions IRB office.
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While monstrous hurricanes are not a frequent occurrence, it always pays to be prepared. Hurricane Sandy was something of an anomaly, but cities and hospitals in the Northeast braced for the monster hurricane, putting plans in place to evacuate patients when needed and ways to continue operations even if the worst happened.
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Years of improvements to the informed consent process and many hours of developing tools and templates to assist IRBs and investigators in fine tuning informed consent documents have helped pave the way for Consent Builder.
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a report taking IRBs to task over what they call inappropriate, indeed absurd, alterations in research protocols and overly stringent guidelines for study submission and approval.
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A new research ethics program seeks to repair problems when investigators misbehave or are in noncompliance.
