Insurers continue to exert pressure on risk managers, and industry leaders say you should be getting a closer look from underwriters
than you have ever had before.
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Self-assessments can be used to address known problems within the organization and also to promote a risk managers stature, says Kenneth W. Felton, RN, MS, FASHRM, senior vice president and health care practice leader with Webster Insurance in Waterbury, CT, and a former hospital risk manager.
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Risk managers must investigate potential exposures with a critical eye, especially when the area in question is a new acquisition for the organization, says Donna Young, CPHRM, FASHRM, vice president of risk management services with Mutual Insurance Co. of Arizona in Phoenix.
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If you dont already have a patient safety officer in your institution, it might just be a matter of time before you do. But should you be the person who fills that role? And if youre not, how does that new position fit in with your role in the organization?
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Have you ever been walking through the hospital and overheard staff talking about patients? So have plenty of other people, according to new research that warns such overheard conversations can be a serious breach of patient confidentiality.
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A practice of 150 obstetrician-gynecologists in Connecticut is planning to charge an extra $500 per pregnancy starting Sept. 1 in response to its high medical liability premiums, even though the state attorney general say such a surcharge probably is illegal.
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A physician in California physician recently sued the Florida Medical Association in Tallahassee and three other doctors in an effort to fight what he says is an attempt to discourage doctors from testifying against others in medical malpractice suits.
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This is an excerpt from the lawsuit filed by John Fullerton, MD, a San Francisco physician who accuses the Florida Medical Association in Tallahassee of intimidating doctors who testify in medical malpractice cases.
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Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox recently announced charges against a Howell, MI, nursing home nurse supervisor that accuse him of stealing prescription painkillers from hospice patients.
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The American Medical Association recently announced that Massachusetts has become the 20th state in a full-blown medical liability crisis due to its deteriorating medical liability climate and the growing threat of patients losing access to care.
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This case highlights potential concern in the areas of communication, informed consent, appropriate certification, and general risk management protocol.
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What this means to you: This case highlights several causes of preventable hospital errors, including poor communication among staff, overworked or minimally trained workers, a shortage of appropriately trained staff, and a faulty system of checks and balances.
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Even though less than a year remains before the HIPAA security rule takes effect April 21, 2005, many health care organizations are a long way from compliance, according to an assessment by Washington, DC-based URAC, the only organization offering a security accreditation program based directly on the HIPAA security rule.
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As of April 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) had received more than 5,000 complaints from individuals about alleged HIPAA privacy violations.
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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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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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