Bush signs medical errors bill
From WebMD: Patient Safety System Becomes Law.
- President Bush signed into law Friday a bill creating the country’s first national system for reporting and tracking medical errors.
The law creates a federally run national database used to collect and study information on medical mistakes and “near misses” that harm patients in doctors offices, hospitals, pharmacies, and other health care settings.
The reporting will be voluntary and anonymous, and won’t be used against anyone in institution-grading or lawsuits. I would think that this aggregate information could be a useful tool for CME providers as part of their overall needs assessment process, but it won’t eliminate the need for specific needs assessment research for individual activities.
Thanks to Debra for the tip!
August 2nd, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Hospitals neeed to update their instruments with active electrode monitoring to ensure patient safety. I had a colleague go in for a routine laparoscopy, but due to an energy leak in the laparoscopic instrument, this person received an internal thermal burn. If AEM was used, this internal burn would have never happened. You can learn more about burns at www.encision.com or see a live video of what a internal thermal burn can do at http://www.encision.com/video_prod.html
Thanks - An advocate of patient safety.
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