For families and patients who undergo hospitalization or medical treatment it is often difficult for them to receive their medical records once requested of the institution. In many cases the failure of the medical institution to produce the requested records delays the ability of the family to file any negligence lawsuit because of an imposed statute of limitations. It can be difficult to obtain medical records from hospitals and other treatment facilities after something goes wrong. Under federal law, every patient or a designated representative has the right to see and copy the patient's medical records. However, missing or disputed records are the most common source of complaints on USA TODAY's Patient Safety website (patient safety.usatoday.com), which was created in 2006 to give readers a venue to express concerns about inadequate medical care. Sidney Wolfe, a physician who leads the health research group at the non-profit consumer advocacy group, Public Citizen says, “there is essentially a double standard” when it comes to accessing medical records. When doctors or hospitals request medical records of their patients they usually get them however, “If it's just the patient who wants the records or the patient's family if the patient died, it's a whole different story,” Wolfe said. Harry Rhodes, a spokesman for the American Health Information Management Association, says most cases of missing records are honest omissions. The federal law that gives patients and family members access to medical records is the privacy section of the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act. HIPAA allows health care providers to withhold records in some circumstances, as long as they explain why they are doing so. Examples of records that may be withheld are psychiatric documents and documents generated in preparation for a legal action.

Posted by Kerry N. Jardine at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having just completed a five-year project to examine and map Colorado's flood risks on a county-by-county basis, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has identified seven Front-Range counties, including Denver and four other metro Denver counties, as being high-risk flood zones.

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Posted by Kerry N. Jardine at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New information released is pointing at a link between prior food poisoning and health problems later experienced months or years later. The CDC says foodborne illnesses cause 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths a year. E. coli and other food borne illnesses are being linked to such health problems as high blood pressure, kidney damage or even kidney failure experienced by people 10 to 20 years later who survived severe E. coli infections as children. Others are experiencing arthritis after suffering from salmonella and shigella. Some are suffering from a mysterious paralysis that attacks people who just had mild symptoms of campylobacter. Donna Rosenbaum of the consumer advocacy group STOP (Safe Tables Our Priority) hears every week complaints from patients with health problems that they suspect or have been told are related to food poisoning years earlier. One woman survived an E. coli poisoning at 8 and had to have her colon removed in her 20s. Others have developed diabetes because of an inflamed pancreas caused by foodborne illness. Some parents wonder if their child’s learning difficulties are linked to it. STOP this month is beginning the first national registry of food-poisoning survivors with long-term health problems to assist scientists with research into the issue.

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Posted by Kerry N. Jardine at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Dorry Segey of Johns Hopkins University, a transplant surgeon, recently completed a study showing people who are obese wait longer for a transplant than average weight people. The research was based on an analysis of records from 132,353 patients on the national kidney transplant waiting list between 1995 and 2006. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. The reason assigned to the discrimination is that the very obese have a greater risk for complications. The study showed that morbidly obese patients who average about 100 pounds over their ideal weight were 44 percent less likely to get a transplant than normal weight patients. Those just slightly less obese were 28 percent less likely to get a transplant. Dr. Segev argues that once someone has been accepted for a waiting list, the patient should progress to the top normally. He also believes the doctors and transplant staff do not consciously choose slimmer candidates over their obese patients. “I don't think any of this is conscious,” Segev said. “It would be hard to imagine any of us in our field would deliberately act against the welfare of our patients. That's not what we do, but there are all sorts of subconscious forces that are happening and there's clearly an unintended bias in practice.” He explains there may be two factors creating the bias. First the main insurer for kidney transplants, Medicare, pays a fixed rate regardless of the difficulty of each case, meaning the transplant hospital eats the added costs for complications. Second, transplant centers with lower survival rates risk losing Medicare funding. With American society increasingly gaining weight and entering the ranks of the medically obese, the implications of the study are worrisome.

Posted by Kerry N. Jardine at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina recently launched a subsidiary, Companion Global Healthcare, to help U.S. patients plan trips to Thailand for lower-cost medical procedures, the Charleston Post and Courier reports. BCBS will cover patients' procedures organized through Companion Global if their BCBS plan allows the travel, according to spokesperson Elizabeth Hammond. Additionally she said the insurer also will cover two follow-up visits with physicians at Doctors Care centers in the state. The company is "one of the first efforts of its kind" in the nation and "reflects several trends," such as an increase in medical tourism, increasing health care costs and rising health standards in Asian countries, according to the Post and Courier.

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Posted by Scott J. Eldredge at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nearly 400 Louisiana physicians at a hospital outside of New Orleans on Monday sued the state for $100 million, saying they were never reimbursed for care they provided at no cost to low-income and uninsured patients after Hurricane Katrina. The lawsuit filed by 381 physicians, claims that Louisiana failed to reimburse them for treating indigent patients since the state-funded Charity Hospital in New Orleans closed on Aug. 29, 2005, following Hurricane Katrina. According to the suit, the state has "inappropriately shifted its responsibilities" onto private physicians while "depriving" doctors of compensation. The hospital is not a party in the lawsuit.

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Posted by Kerry N. Jardine at 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Common Good, the national nonpartisan legal reform coalition Alan Simpson is a member of, has been awarded a two-year grant of nearly $1 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to promote the creation of special health courts to handle medical injury disputes in six states. Common Good (http://www.cgood.org) is a nonpartisan legal reform coalition dedicated to restoring common sense to America. Its advisory board is composed of leaders in a wide range of fields including former government officials. The new project builds on a previous RWJF-funded project by Common Good and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) to design a prototype for special health courts. Common Good encourages health courts to restore reliability to medical justice. While many thousands of patients suffer preventable medical injuries each year, only a small fraction of them are compensated for their losses. Administrative costs in today's system are extremely high, and patients in similar circumstances often receive vastly different judicial outcomes. Health care experts often cite the current legal system as a major impediment to improving quality of care, since it effectively discourages physicians and hospitals from being candid about errors in treatment.

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Posted by Michael S. Burg at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gil Dwayne Smith, the father of a 2-year-old boy who drowned during a summer boating accident at Carter Lake, was sentenced Tuesday to 60 days in jail and five years probation. Smith, 44, of Longmont, pleaded guilty to a charge of child abuse resulting in death in December. As part of his plea agreement with the district attorney's office, the maximum sentence Smith could have received was 90 days.

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Posted by Kerry N. Jardine at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. agreed Tuesday to settle hundreds of lawsuits by policyholders and reopen and pay thousands of other disputed claims. The landmark deal is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars for Mississippi homeowners devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The settlement calls for State Farm to pay about $80 million to more than 600 policyholders who sued the company for refusing to cover damage from the Aug. 29, 2005,
storm. State Farm also agreed to pay at least $50 million if not hundreds of millions more because there isn't a cap on the amount, to thousands of Mississippi policyholders whose claims were denied but didn't sue the company.

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Posted by Kerry N. Jardine at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the minutes before the crash of a commuter jet that took off from the wrong runway, the pilots discussed their families, their dogs and job opportunities, violating at times a rule against extraneous cockpit conversation, the airline said Wednesday. The National Transportation Safety Board released a transcript Wednesday of the cockpit recording aboard Comair Flight 5191. The transcript also showed that one of the pilots noted something was amiss when he glanced down the Lexington, Ky., airstrip and said it looked "weird" because it had no lights. The transcript was the first public disclosure of the pilots' conversations during the ill-fated flight, which struggled to get airborne after trying to take off from a runway that was too short for passenger jets. The plane went down in flames, killing 49 people in the deadliest American aviation disaster in five years.

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Posted by Kerry N. Jardine at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As we celebrate the 4th of July and our constitutional form of government built on checks and balances, it is trendy to complain that the legal system is broken by pointing to selected "facts" about it. Upon closer examination, those "facts" are often demonstrably inaccurate or taken out of context.

The fact of the matter is that our liberties and our prosperity are protected by the legal system we enjoy. Our legal system, while imperfect, protects the individual from the tyranny of the powerful. Trials must be open. Accusers must be faced. Citizens, not paid professionals, make the decisions [the jury].

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Posted by David P. Hersh at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)