Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf is a New York Plaintiff's personal injury law firm specializing in automobile accidents, construction accidents, medical malpractice, products liability, police misconduct and all types of New York personal injury litigation.

Articles Posted in Medical Malpractice

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Dosing errors, delay to treat or failure to diagnose a medical condition because of poor interaction between humans and computers or loss of data can result in serious personal injury and wrongful death.

Poor choice or inadequate implementation of Emergency Department Information Systems (EDISs) can threaten health care quality and patient safety. Findings and recommendations from two work groups from the American College of Emergency Physicians were released in a report last Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

The report indicates that The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services “meaningful use” incentive programs as well as additional requirements for detailed reporting of quality metrics have been major catalysts for the development and implementations of EDISs. However systems functionality varies greatly and it is crucial for emergency providers to actively participate in decisions about EDISs selection, implementation and monitoring.

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During colonoscopy, endoscopists can find potentially precancerous growths (polyps) and remove them, however some polyps especially on the right side of the colon are more difficult to detect. Failure to detect these polyps reduces the efficacy of colonoscopy for colon cancer screening.

By using a quarterly report card, endoscopists at the Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Indianapolis were able to increase the overall adjusted adenoma (precancerous polyp) detection rate from 44.7 percent to 53.9 percent, and to improve the cecal intubation rate from 95.6 percent to 98.1 percent. The complete study can be found in the June issue of GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE)

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Our partner Stephen Mackauf and John E. Hall Jr. from Hall Booth Smith, P.C. will co chair the 12th Annual Advanced Forum of the American Conference Institute on Obstetric Malpractice Claims on June 26th-27 2013 in Philadelphia. For more iinformation see our prior post here.

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Endoscope.png30 % of duodenoscopes, 24% of gastroscopes and 3% of colonoscopes have unacceptable level of “bio dirt” from previous clients bodies leading to a potential risk of infection according to a new study by researchers at 3M infection Prevention Division and presented at the 40th Annual Conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

After being used flexible endoscopes are manually cleaned by a hospital technician who will visually inspect them and then soak them in high level disinfectant. However the study indicates that visual inspection is not enough as contamination is often invisible to the naked eye. The study suggests hospitals should improve their cleaning protocol by having specific guidelines by type of instrument and by identifying if there are any critical steps missing in the manual cleaning process.

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Diagnostic errors are not a new problem, in 1991 the Harvard medical Practice Study, investigated Medical Malpractice in New York Hospitals and found out that diagnostic errors were accounting for 14% of physicians errors and that 75% of them were due to doctors negligence.

In 1999 a study from the Institute of Medicine “To Err is Human”, looks at diagnostic errors and classifies them in four different categories: error or delay in diagnosis, failure to employ indicated tests, use of outmoded tests or therapy and failure to act on results of monitoring or testing.

Despite these studies, diagnostic errors have been largely ignored until recent research calculated the impact of such errors. Results from a 2009 report funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality showed that 28% of diagnostic mistakes were life-threatening or had resulted in death or permanent disability.

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230px-Cerebral_angiography%2C_arteria_vertebralis_sinister_injection.JPG Angiography alone doesn’t detect Ischemia and may lead to misdiagnosis when a patient is being checked for chest pain. A routine Functional Flow Reserve Measurement (FFR) after the angiography would lead to a change of diagnosis for 1 out of 4 patients according to a new study presented at EuroPCR 2013 by Nick Curzen, Professor of Interventional Cardiology, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust and Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.

Most cadiologists base their decision on the angiography only. The angiography is an X-ray of the blood vessel (see picture) that the cardiologist uses to assess if some blood vessels are blocked or damaged. The study argues that angiography only doesn’t detect ischemia, a restriction in blood supply to tissues, causing a shortage of oxygen and glucose needed to keep tissue alive. This may lead cardiologists to fail to diagnose a medical condition and to develop an inappropriate treatment plan for the patient.

Researchers, studied 200 patients suffering from Chest Pain. Each patient underwent an angiography. Based on the angiography only a cardiologist made a diagnosis and developed a treatment plan for each patient as well as recommendations for medical treatment such as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) or request for more information. The cardiologist left the room and then each patient had a Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR) measurement. Results with FFR were shown again to the cardiologist. Based on this additional information the cardiolgist changed the treatment for 25% of the patients.

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The average profit margin for a hospital to treat an infected patient is $ 55,000 while the margin to treat a similar patient without infection is just $ 6,500 according to a recent study from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published in the American Journal of Medical Quality.

Hospitals lose on average $14,000 per patient when the bill is paid by Medicare or Medicaid but when the bill is paid by private insurance the hospital makes on average a margin of $216,000 per patient before expenses.

The study demonstrates that it is in the financial interest of private insurers to help hospitals find ways to reduce the number of CLABSI infections.

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Severely injured women are 21% less likely to receive appropriate care in a trauma center than men. Results are similar for women injured after a fall or a car accident, across all income levels and also when comparing rural versus urban patients according to a study , led by Andrea Hill, MSc, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at the Sunnybrook Health Science Centre and the University of Toronto in Canada, and presented yesterday at the American Thoracic Society International Conference .

The researchers studied more than 98,800 patients admitted to trauma centers for severe injuries. Results show that 49.6% of women and 63.2% of men received care after being severely injured.

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Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection is caused by a specific staph bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics and therefore very difficult to treat. If not diagnosed on time MRSA can be life threatening. MRSA is a major concern for hospitals where the superbug can attack older patients or those suffering from weakened immune system. Patients necessitating medical tubing such as intravenous line or catheters are also at risk as well as patients staying in nursing homes. MRSA is also an issue in child care centers, military camps and jails.

There is an urgent need to find therapeutic ways to fight this superbug. In research appearing in the Journal PLOS ONE , Shelley Haydel, a researcher at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute demonstrate that particular metal ions attached to the clay may have the potential to kill MRSA as well as a range of other dangerous pathogens including E-coli. Medical property of clay has been recognized since antiquity when it was used for its wound healing property.

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There is a higher rate of failure to diagnose breast cancer among women who are screened using computed radiography compared to women who are screened using digital direct radiography according to a new study lead by Anna M. Chiarelli, Ph.D., senior scientist in Prevention and Cancer Control at Cancer Care Ontario in Toronto, and published online in the journal Radiology.

The study results show that cancer detection with digital mammography that involves direct radiography technology was similar to that with screen film mammography in women aged 50–74 years; however, for computed radiography the risk of cancer detection is significantly lower-by 21%-among all screening techniques.

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