Indiana Injury Lawyer Blog

Pharmaceutical companies will soon be required to disclose payments that they make to doctors. The aim is to increase transparency, and ensure that doctors influenced by these payments do not make medical decisions that impact patient safety and increase healthcare costs.

Every year, thousands of doctors across the country receive payments from pharmaceutical drug companies. Doctors are paid for research they conduct, as well as for consulting and speaking engagements. Besides making cash gifts, many companies also pay doctors in the form of dinners and vacations. There are a large number of doctors across the country who receive such payments from pharmaceutical companies. In fact, the pharmaceutical drug industry spends millions of dollars every year on such payments.

Several studies have indicated that doctors can be influenced by the payments that they receive from pharmaceutical companies. These doctors, it has been found, are much more likely to contribute to high costs of medical care by prescribing more expensive drugs, or recommending medical devices even when they are not necessary.

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A new study by the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services finds that more often than not, staff at hospitals fail to report medical errors. In fact, according to the study, staff recognize and report just one out of every 7 medical errors that harm Medicare patients in the hospital.

The study was conducted by Daniel Levinson, Inspector General of the Department Health and Human Services. In his report based on a survey of hospital administrators, he says that in spite of hospitals trying to foster an environment that encourages staff to report medical errors, far too many medical errors are going unreported. Many of these errors resulted in adverse patient events, like bedsores, delirium from over use of painkillers, as well as bleeding from the use of blood thinning medications. In all these cases, the errors contributed to adverse patient events that actually cause fatalities.

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While there are a number of benefits from the use of medical and health technology, there are also a number of risks associated with the use of such technology. The ECRI Institute has released a list of the top 10 technology hazards for the year 2012.

The list was compiled after asking the following questions-

• How harmful is the hazard associated with the technology?
• How likely is the hazard?
• How widespread is it?
• Is it a high-profile problem?

1. Indiana medical malpractice lawyers will not be too surprised to find that alarm fatigue is ranked as the number one technology hazard in 2012. Alarm-related adverse events occur because of alarm fatigue when nurses and other staff become overexposed, and fatigued by the sheer numbers of alerts that they have to deal with everyday.

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