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 […]
On this blog, I focus on what most of my clients have in common – the need for serious medical care and the attendant expenses. I often blog about Quality Fraud and share news items about how the cost of healthcare is driven by misrepresentations made in the course of providing care. Unlike other markets, […]
Recent hospital ratings and comparative measurements from JAMA. Associations Between Hospital Characteristics, Measure Reporting, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings
On a topic we have been covering with reference to our data breach class action cases, The Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force finds lax compliance. REPORT ON IMPROVING CYBERSECURITY IN THE HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY
Today in Quality Fraud: Endoscope Maker, Olympus, settles for harms caused by gynecologic surgical tool that spreads cancer cells – following a 2016 $646M criminal/civil settlement with the Feds over a bribery and kickback scheme. 2016 Federal Criminal Bribery and Kickback Settlement by Olympus
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 […]
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 […]
Quality Fraud drives medical costs. DOJ Stressing Healthcare Fraud
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 […]
Dartmouth study on reigning in healthcare costs This chart on the left (in the article linked above) was originally created by the Kaiser Foundation and is now outdated (as shown in the chart on the right) – largely because the cost of drugs, medical devices and hospitalizations has skyrocketed. As a percentage, the amount we spend on primary […]
