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Patient-safety issues raised by the critics of limits on resident duty hours have not materialized. But concerns about doctors-in-training spending less time with patients appear to be valid, according to two new studies in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education set an 80-hour weekly work limit (averaged over four weeks) in 2003. Further limits, including restricting first-year residents to 16-hour shifts went into effect in 2011. The movement to limit resident work hours was originally driven by Sidney Zion, a journalist, prosecutor and novelist, whose 18-year-old daughter Libby died a few hours after being admitted to New York Hospital on the night of March 4, 1984. His fight led to New York state limiting residents to an 80-hour workweek and 24-hour shifts in 1989.
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A federally chartered special work group with representatives from three federal agencies has submitted its draft recommendations on establishing a regulatory framework for health IT.
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Medical journals and healthcare publications may soon notice more readers taking deep research dives into their archives looking for old studies, reports and articles on defensive medicine. That's because California's landmark 1975 Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act—which limits pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice lawsuits to $250,000—is coming under fire from two fronts.
The Consumer Watchdog organization and “medical negligence survivors” are working to get the Troy and Alana Pack Patient Safety Act, a ballot initiative, on the November ballot. Named after the children killed in a 2003 accident, the measure would require hospitals to subject physicians to random drug and alcohol testing, require mandatory testing after an unexpected death or serious injury, and adjust the $250,000 cap for inflation. That would raise the cap to $1.1 million. It needs to get about 750,000 signatures to get on the ballot.
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The for-profit assisted-living industry came under the harsh spotlight of PBS' “Frontline” investigators Tuesday night as the news program took Seattle-based Emeritus Corp. to task for a number of deaths and injuries involving residents with dementia at Emeritus facilities across the country.
Emeritus, which was founded in 1983 and has 483 facilities around the country, is the one of the country's biggest assisted-living operators.
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The latest is not always the greatest in medical treatments, according to a study posted on the Mayo Clinic Proceedings website. It reviewed the findings of more than 1,300 previously published reports on medical practices.
Clinical areas where current practice standards were contradicted by published studies include the drug aprotinin used in cardiac surgery, the use of hormone therapy for postmenopausal women, the use of pulmonary artery catheters, the recommended glycemic targets for diabetics, and the use of arthroscopic surgery of the knee for osteoarthritis.
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Mobile computing devices are becoming almost as much of an essential tool in U.S. physician practices as the exam table, according to a new survey.
Nearly 80% of 300 U.S. practicing physicians in primary care, family and internal medicine that were sampled and surveyed in April said they were using a smartphone in their “day-to-day practice.” Another 61% were using mobile tablets.
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So far, members of a trade group of health information technology developers like some of what they see in a federal health IT safety initiative that focuses on quantifying any adverse impacts their software is having on patients. But these vendors are withholding final judgment until more plan details are unveiled.
On July 2, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS released its 50-page Health Information Technology Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan that creates an infrastructure to collect and analyze data about health IT-related patient safety events.
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Healthcare industry groups are pressing regulators to issue the delayed final rule requiring manufacturers to mark medical devices with unique identifiers to improve patient safety and help healthcare providers during product recalls.
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The healthcare industry, with the federal government at the helm, is setting sail on a voyage into the unknown: whether and to what extent patients are suffering harm from the systems that providers have spent many billions of dollars buying, and the feds many billions in incentivizing.
“That's the part we don't know,” said Dr. Ron Wyatt, medical director, division of healthcare improvement at the Joint Commission. “We know that probably less than 10% of adverse events are reported. That's how big the water is.”
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