While it’s easy to shrug-off patients that don’t show for their appointments and to revel in the few extra minutes you may have to get other work done or to get your schedule back on track, it’s really not a good idea. No-show patients result in lost revenue, lost productivity and could open a practice […]

Every physician should expect to be sued for medical malpractice at least once or twice in his or her career. And, even though approximately 65% of all medical malpractice lawsuits are dropped, dismissed or withdrawn, the process can still prove to be challenging, at best, and nightmarish, at worst. But, is there a way to […]

Many physicians are surprised to hear that cocaine is still used today in medicine –but why is this? Is it because it’s not that relevant to their specialty, and they don’t have the need to use it, or is it because they simply don’t think that it’s still relevant as a drug to be used […]

A community hospital in Boulder Colorado is facing a major challenge this week because it’s computer system has failed.  The IT professionals handling the outage have not been able to determine what caused the issue, or if it is related to hacking.  These types of warning signs should grab the attention of hospital and medical […]

AMedNews.com recently reported on the occurrence of surgical “never events” –events so severe and egregious that they should never happen. Never. But, never say never, because never happens, in this case, on average, about 80 times per week. Never events include leaving an instrument in a patient, operating on the wrong body part, the wrong […]

We have written a lot about data breaches and HIPAA violations on this blog. Let’s see what the latest data tells us and what can we learn from it. Healthcare IT News recently wrote about 2012’s largest HIPAA breaches. In essence, the top 10 breaches present us with two overwhelming lessons: 1. Seriously consider whether […]

Most of us like to peruse Facebook and see what are friends and family are up to that day. Unfortunately, we mostly see a stream of information with little or no value, but hey, that’s our mother-in-law posting that picture of 2 kittens rolling around on the floor with a sock…….so we should look at […]

Your office manager has just handed you the “Summons and Complaint” that the county sheriff has served on your practice. You look at the name on the summons, and see that one of your longstanding patients is the plaintiff. You are shocked; you’ve never been sued in fifteen years of practice. What do you do […]

There are no absolutes in the practice of medicine. Diagnoses can be wrong for a number of reasons, complications can arise that couldn’t reasonably be foreseen, infections can set in—a number of variables can cause treatments or procedures to not render the desired results. Some situations are simply unavoidable; others should never occur. So physicians […]