Legal

There are countless ethical and legal reasons to ensure confidential patient data remain confidential. When private information becomes available to the general public, cyber terrorists or criminals, or prospective employers the consequences are grave for patients and damaging to the healthcare institution’s reputation. Now we’re getting a good sense of just how severe legal and monetary judgements can be for organizations found to have committed health data privacy violations. The Federal Trade Commission imposed a …

We’re no mathematicians, but the odds of a vehicle crashing through the front door of an urgent care center have go to be awfully slim. And yet, it happens—very recently in Tiffin, OH, in fact. As reported by The Advertiser-Tribune there, a driver hit the accelerator instead of the brake when pulling into a parking space in front of the clinic. No one was injured. However, believe it or not, in addition to having to …

Optimistically, you could presume that urgent care employees get the urge to post about their shift on social media because they’re proud of the work they do. Or, they may just find certain cases newsworthy or to have a novel aspect that would be of interest to friends and followers. Most, if not all, would understand that identifying a patient by name would be unethical and illegal. An ugly legal case unfolding in Florida right …

An osteopathic physician in Illinois was just sentenced to 1 year in prison for writing alprazolam prescriptions for patients for nontherapeutic use. According to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, he 1) didn’t examine the six patients he was prescribing for, 2) knew there was no medical need for the drugs, and 3) had knowledge that the drugs would be sold or abused. Not surprisingly, it was also shown that …

The fact that it’s so newsworthy will tell you the odds of a car crashing through your front door are pretty low. That doesn’t minimize the consequences when it happens to you, though. The operators of WellNow Urgent Care in Huber Heights, OH are finding that out the hard way right now. As noted in an article published in the Dayton Daily News, two people were injured when a vehicle collided into the building; one …

A physician in California has been sentenced to 7 years in prison after being convicted of ordering “excessive and medically unnecessary x-rays to healthy patients” and subsequently billing both Medicare and Medi-Cal as reported in MedPage Today. State law enforcement first caught wind that something in the practice could be amiss in 2016. Upon investigating the cases of 10 reportedly randomly selected patients, they say they found evidence of medically unnecessary x-rays and fraudulent billing. …

A post currently on the California Radiologic Health Branch (RHB) website—a resource for the state’s licensed radiology techs—should serve as a timely reminder to thoroughly check the backgrounds of prospective new hire. The missive recounts how one individual with an extensive rap sheet that includes convictions for sexual battery, false imprisonment, grand theft, and other felonies was able to use phony documents to gain employment as an RT in clinics, hospitals, and medical offices in …

You want the best, most reliable clinicians for your patients. And their performance is essential to your future success. There’s more to capability than experience and clinical skill, however, and there could be red flags in an otherwise stellar candidate’s past that they’d be unlikely to mention in an interview. The headlines out of Clallam County, Washington offer a bracing reminder of that as an emergency room physician there has been arrested and charged with …

The Supreme Court of the United States just issued a ruling that will make it more difficult for prosecutors to bring charges against physicians on the grounds that they violated the Controlled Substances Act. In a 6–3 vote, SCOTUS rejected lower courts’ convictions of a pair of pain specialists in Alabama and Arizona. Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion expressed that the existing regulatory language is “ambiguous.” It went on to advise that future prosecutorial efforts …