Well, you’ll do it your way and I’ll do it my way,
And we’ll see who’s the one to survive.
You’ll find that with no foundation
Or qualifications
There’s no way that you can get by,
No, there’s no way you can get by.The Kinks, The Hard Way
I can remember the first time my Dad gave me a medical record to review. It was the eighties and I was still in school. This was in the day of handwritten charts and I was unfamiliar with almost all of the medical terms and abbreviations. It was like an undiscovered world – one in which we hadn’t been invited except by the client. I devoured the stuff, learning most of it on the fly on my own. The skill came in handy when it came time to represent hospitals and doctors. By the time I was representing my own clients, I’d seen just about everything there is to see: from missing records to altered ones.
I’ve been at this blog steadily for over two years, creating my own original content for the education of my clients and anyone else interested in the areas where law and medicine intersect. Like the medical record reading, it is a foreign language skill developed over time. I’ve learned a lot about myself, my practice, my clients, and the issues I force myself to pore over in order to create the content.
We often focus here on breakdowns in the health care system – in order to improve patient care. We also highlight the effects of the slow-motion breakdown of our healthcare delivery system over the last few decades:
- A staggering number of personal bankruptcies caused or contributed to being caused by medical expenses.
- Systemic Hospital Patient Dumping: You can read our links to stories on patient dumping here (The Dogs On Main Street Howl), here, here, and here.
- Ubiquitous Data Breaches: You can read about our data breach class action experience here (Website Page), here, here, here (Engle Fallout), here (November 2016 Hearings), and here (Data Breach Primer).
- An explosion of Sentinel Events: You can read about our landmark and precedent-setting work following “sentinel events” here (Discovery of JCHAO records), here (Overdose as sentinel event), here (Charles v. Baptist Supreme Court decision), and here.
- An ongoing epidemic of #Quality Fraud: You can read some of our #QualityFraud posts over the last two years here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
- The unrelenting effects of our Opioid Crisis: You can read the blog posts about the opioid epidemic and its effect on our health care system here, here (No, man, they’re taking me to Pittsburgh), here, here, here, and here (And Time Stood Still).
Thank you all for visiting and contributing. Please keep coming back.