October 4, 2017
Oral arguments were held yesterday in what will likely be the landmark decision on Wisconsin’s gerrymandering in Gill v Whitford. Gorsuch-Ginsberg exchange
September 22, 2017
A hospital crisis in rural America. Ground Zero
No, Man – They’re Taking Me To Pittsburgh
My work takes me to strange places. I’ve attended autopsies in Atlanta, crashed plane inspections at small rural airports, multi-day car and truck inspections in salvage yards, surreal crash sites and countless hospital and rehabilitation settings to witness and record clients struggling to overcome devastating injuries. Eyewitness observation of a client’s experiences can be essential to understanding […]
Overdose (No. 3)
This is the third in our blog series on obtaining and using confidential peer review records in litigation. In Overdose (No. 1), I reviewed JCAHO Hospital Root Cause Analysis and Sentinel Event Reporting. In Overdose (No. 2), I reviewed Hospital adverse medical incident reports, including Code 15 reports on nursing negligence submitted in Florida to the […]
Overdose (No. 2)
In my last Weekly Blog, I reviewed an Accreditation Decision Report I secured from internal Hospital and JCAHO investigations of a fatal overdose. These reports are usually confidential and contain information not available in other sources. That kind of sensitive information is rarely available but can be critical to a successful outcome in medical malpractice […]
Overdose
On April 4, 1997, Charles Blair wrote a letter for the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Hospitals Organization (JCAHO) to a Hospital Administrator. The JCAHO letter describes a “sentinel event” that occurred in March, during which a patient died in the Hospital Recovery Room from an overdose of concentrated medicine given by her healthcare providers […]
Law Day: The Fourteenth Amendment
President Eisenhower created Law Day in the United States for the first day of May. This year, the American Bar Association has chosen the theme of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution – the most cited and litigated provision in our Constitution. Passed in 1868 after the Civil War, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the freeing […]
Peer Review
In January of 2005, a local court granted a Motion to Compel against a Hospital and its physicians – ordering them to produce discovery responses to written questions (interrogatories) and requests for documents (requests for production). Orders like this are routine – they are entered every day in all kinds of cases. What made this […]
Lee Memorial or Lee Health?
Earlier on this blog, we explored the roots of a local public hospital. See, the January 9, 16 and 23rd blog posts on this blog (Daily and Weekly). We also explored the same public hospital’s public relations campaign and name change following a string of penalties ($2.4 million in 2016 and $2.9 million in 2014) with […]
Announcement: We Partner with TrySail Litigation Support Services
This blog tracks the challenges posed by changes in law and healthcare, focusing on serious but avoidable harms that can arise. Through our new association with TrySail Litigation Services, we are extending the services available to clients and guests alike. TrySail is an e-commerce law store, product site and online litigation support center featuring access to investigations, […]