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 […]
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costs This chart on the left (in the article linked above) was originally created by the Kaiser Foundation and is now outdated (as shown in the chart on the right) – largely because the cost of drugs, medical devices and hospitalizations has skyrocketed.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 […]
In one-quarter of the country, girls born today may live shorter lives than their mothers, and the country as a whole is falling behind other industrialized nations in the march toward longer life, according to a study just released by the Institute for Health Metrics. Life expectancy by county in the U.S. varies as much as […]
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 […]
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 […]
When I started practicing law in 1988, there was only one advertiser in town. His office was in Hollywood, Florida and his tag line was, “the light is always on”. I used to think about the abuse his cleaning staff may have endured for forgetting not to turn the light off at night. Later, other […]
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 […]
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, […]
