Adverse Event Investigations Require Focus on Just Culture, Improvements
Woods Rogers’ Justin Lugar, a member of our firm’s Government & Special Investigations Practice, was quoted by Healthcare Risk Management discussing how providers should respond after an adverse event to improve patient safety and reduce liability.
“Preservation of the medical record should be a top priority after an adverse event,” Justin told the publication in a recent interview. “Preserve the records and make sure no edits are made to the electronic medical record. Know that when anyone looks at the medical records, it’s going to be recorded in an event log which can be used down the road. I’ve seen a medical malpractice case in which one of my colleagues was able to get the metadata from the electronic medical records and see who accessed the record in the 30 minutes following the death and saw that it went all the way to the chief medical officer, the head of the hospital, the legal counsel, all of them. They all knew about it very quickly, which means they deemed it to be a big deal.”
Justin advises medical practitioners that it would be wise to have a protocol for who is authorized to go into the record after an adverse event. Communications with families also are important, he says, because having those witnessed and documented can help avoid having family members claim they were told different information.
Justin shared a story from a previous case where he defended a doctor in a malpractice claim that depended on a family member’s allegation of what they were told about the patient’s injury. “The whole claim was based on a family member of this patient who had was supposedly told after the surgery that the patient’s head was dropped during a fusion of the neck. Of course, that’s kind of a big deal, and I don’t think dropping a head in the middle of a very precise surgery happens very often. Ultimately, at the end of the day, there were neuro-monitoring records that were able to disprove that any head drop occurred because you would have seen a spike in neural activity if that had happened. But the whole thing could have been nipped in the bud if somebody had taken good records about what was communicated to the family on what day and by whom.”
Team
Of Counsel
