JCAHO Sentinel Event Alert: Medication Reconciliation to Prevent Errors

Monday, 30 January 2006
JCAHO issued a Sentinel Event Alert on January 27, 2006, advising health care providers to perform medication reconciliations at every transition of care in which new medications are ordered. Medication reconcilition should be performed to avoid medication errors such as omissions, duplications, dosing errors, or drug interactions.

The alert states that the medication reconciliation process should comprise five steps: 1) develop a list of current medications; 2) develop a list of medications to be prescribed; 3) compare the medications on the two lists; 4) make clinical decisions based on the comparison; and 5) communicate the new list to appropriate caregivers and to the patient.

For more details read the full Sentinel Event Alert, "Using medication reconciliation to prevent errors".

SEC Rule Revising Sarbanes-Oxley

The Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") on January 27, 2006, posted a proposed rule revising the rules governing disclosure by public companies of executive compensation and director compensation, as well as addressing director independence, related party transactions, and other corporate governance matters. Although I have not read all 370 pages of the proposed rule I suspect that nonprofit health care providers should examime the proposed rule and the inpact it might have on their individual facilities. Nationwide and in West Virginia there has been an increase in public scrutiny over the executive compensation levels of many executives of nonprofit health care systems and facilities.

The Ohio River

Sunday, 29 January 2006
The Ohio River flows behind my dad’s house in New Martinsville. I took this photo while I was home in New Martinsville over the holidays. This is the view from the kitchen and dining room. Notice the moon still shining.

Over the years our family has grown accustomed to the Ohio River flowing by with all its beauty, changing from day to day and season to season. It’s a photo like this that reminds me how beautiful it can be. I'm often struck when someone visits our house for the first time and is mesmerized by the beauty of the river and fascinate by the tug/barge traffic as it goes up and down the river.

I was playing around with a new feature that I noticed on Flickr that links you to Zazzle.com. You can take a photo on Flickr and create a custom stamp. If you haven’t checked out Zazzle (or Flickr) give them a whirl. Zazzle is such a simple concept -- it allows you to create things using your (or some other artists) artwork, photos, etc. I was thinking about creating a few stamps using this photo to send to my dad as a gift.

Here are the instructions on how to use the Zazzle stamp feature through Flickr:

To start creating a real U.S. postage stamp with Zazzle, first head over to one of your photos. On your photo pages, you will see an "order prints" menu button: Click the "Order Prints" button and find the Zazzle option at the bottom. Have fun — and send us a postcard!

Interesting Perspective on Electronic Health Record Storage

The Healthcare IT Guy, has a thought provoking post, "$10K vs. Patient Data Backup Tapes," discussing the need for businesses and health care providers to become more aware of how they handle and protect (or fail to protect) confidential business and health care information, including customer, patient and financial data.

Due to the shift occuring from a traditional paper based world to an electronic storage (often very mobile storage) based world we continue to see an increase in data being lost, stolen or otherwise compromised requiring businesses and health care providers to report and publicize such data disasters. The recent $10M fine by the FTC against Choicepoint should make business and industry to take note of the potential exposure, financially or otherwise, that can accompany a breach of data.

Febuary 27 Hearing on Motion to Compel: Google vs. DOJ

A hearing on the Department of Justice's Motion to Compel Compliance with Subpeona Duces Tecum has been set for Febuary 27 before U.S. District Court Judge James Ware in United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. The Declaration of Joel McElvain, Trial Attorney for Department of Justice, provides additional background details including the original DOJ letter request and subpoena duces tecum to Google seeking materials relevant to its defense in the ACLU vs. Gonzales matter, responsive letter by Google's counsel and Protective Order entered by the Court in the ACLU vs. Gonzales matter. Also, the Declaration of Philip B. Stark, Ph.D. filed in support of the Motion to Compel Compliance with Subpoena Duces Tecum is interesting to provide a context and background of the reasons the DOJ is seeking the search engine information in connection with the ACLU vs. Gonzales matter.

According to the Yahoo news article, Judge Ware also set a February 6 date for Google to file its response in opposition to the Department of Justice's motion to compel and a February 13 date for the DOJ to file its reply to whatever Google has to say.

Interesting reading for those of us who have filed motions to quash subpoenas or defended motions to compel involving requests for the production of private and confidential information, especially those situations where the subpeonas are issued to non-party participants in the underlying litigation.

WebMD Health Blogs

Thursday, 26 January 2006
WebMD has rolled out a number of new health topic blogs. This weeks edition of Grand Rounds hosted by Kevin, M.D. featured some of the posts on the WebMD Health Blogs. After scanning some of the blogs the quality of the content looks great. I have subscribed to a couple RSS feeds to follow posts on topics of interest to me.

The health blogs cover a wide variety of topics of interest to health care consumers. Some of the blogs are by health care experts (notice the EV "Expert View" designation) and other are by WebMD members. Based on the archives from most of the blogs it appears that WebMD has had this project up and running since November 2005.

I looked for some additional information on the WebMD member blogs but could not find any information. The curious lawyer in me was interested to understand how members are chosen to be a WebMD sponsored blog. Are there any restrictions placed on posting? Are the members compensated for blogging? etc. WebMD would benefit by having a disclosure and general summary of blog policies and background on the blogs on the main blog page.

I'd like to welcome all the new bloggers to the growing network of bloggers focusing on health and health care industry topics.

AHLA Conference

I'm planning on attending the "Hospital and Health Systems Law Institute" sponsored by the American Health Lawyer Association in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida from February 9-10. If any regular readers are attending the AHLA event and want to have lunch and discuss health care, blogs, etc. please drop me an email or post a comment.

If you are a health care lawyer and not familiar with the AHLA you should check out the association. They offer great benefits to members and have first rate continuing education events.