Taking Control of Your Healthcare

In a nationwide survey of roughly 1,800 physicians, 17% had some level of disagreement with the notion that they should “never tell a patient something that is not true.” Not only that, but 11% of those surveyed acknowledged that they had told a patient “something that was not true” in the past year. Huh? What […]

Preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. We’re talking about 250,000 lives lost, trailing only heart disease and cancer. If you think these errors are confined to hospitalized patients, you’d be wrong. About half of them are the result of mistakes in the outpatient setting (read: doctors’ offices). By […]

It has been over 10 years since the prestigious Institute of Medicine reported that 90,000 patients loose their lives each year because of a preventable medical error. Mistakes such as prescription errors, wrong-site surgeries, and hospital acquired infections abound in hospitals. Despite this report and numerous attempts by agencies who are charged with keeping patients safe in […]

Since the prestigious Institute of Medicine issued it’s report on preventable medical errors in 1999 (“To Err is Human”), nothing seems to have changed. Approximately, 100,000 people continure to die each year from preventable medical errors while millions more are seriously injured. We’re not just talking about a slip of the hand during surgery, but, something as […]

The Joint Commissionhas (JC) issued a “sentenal alert” for health information technology. A sentenal alert is defined as preventable, unintended injuries or complications resulting in death, disability, or prolonged hospital stay that arise from healthcare management. The Joint Commission is a non-profit watchdog group that sets basic safety standards for our nations hospitals. Since electronic medical records […]