Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice

To reduce medical malpractice, the Institute of Medicine called for the measurement and reporting of physicians quality in its reports To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System (1999) and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century (2001). More than 10 years later, it remains very difficult for patients in most states to find quality information on physicians.

A recent Sate Report Card on Transparency of Physicians Quality Information, authored by Francois de Brantes, MS, MBA, Elizabeth Bailey, MPH, Jessica DiLorenzo, MA and Michael Moses, MS from the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute in Newtown, Conn shows that only Minnesota and Washington State have a high level of transparency on physicians. California is somewhat transparent but for all other states patients have little access to information on the quality of their physicians.

Every drug with two names, brand name and generic name, is a medication error waiting to happen, writes Theresa Brown in her latest Opinion in The New York Times blog.
A system that would keep only the brand name with a “-G” appended at the end of the name for generic would make more sense and reduce confusion.

Read the complete opinion

The risk of physician-related ED medication errors among seriously ill and injured children in rural EDs can be significantly reduced with telemedicine consultations according to a study published in the current issue of Pediatrics, the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The study looked at 234 seriously ill and injured children presenting to 8 rural EDs with access to pediatric critical care physicians from an academic children’s hospital. 73 received telemedicine consultations, 85 received telephone consultations, and 76 received no specialist consultations. Medications for patients who received telemedicine consultations had significantly fewer physician-related errors (3.4%) than medications for patients who received telephone consultations (10.8%) or no consultations (12.5%).

A doctor can commit medical malpractice if he is not properly trained to use the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. In a recent case study Web Morbidity and Mortality looks at the case of an epileptic patient who experienced temporary toxicity because of a medication error linked to improper use of EMR.

After being treated in a hospital for seizures, a patient was discharged with an outpatient plan that was to begin phenytoin 500 mg once daily. The resident doctor who prepared the prescription was not familiar with the Electronic Medical Record and failed to notice that the EMR default frequency for phenytoin was “TID” which means 3 times a day. Because the dose was much bigger than normally prescribed an alert was triggered by the EMR but this alert was overridden by the resident doctor who also seemed to suffer from alert fatigue.

Read the complete case and commentary on WebM&M.

Central Line-Associated Bloodstream Infections (CLABSI) are often the result of medical malpractice. An estimated 250,000 CLABSIs occur every year in the US with 800,000 of them happening in the emergency room. More than 30,000 people die from CLABSI in the US every year. The CDC estimates that the yearly cost related to CLABSI is $1 billion.

To prevent these infections, the Joint Commission Today released a very useful toolkit to supplement a previously published monograph entitled “Preventing Central Line-Associated Bloodstream Infections – A Global Challenge, A Global Perspective” . This document provides best practices and guidelines for healthcare professionals who insert and care for intravascular catheters and who are responsible for the surveillance, prevention, and control of infections in all healthcare settings.