Syracuse Personal Injury Law Blog

New York senator cashes in after blocking important malpractice law

Published on: October 24, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

The death of Lavern’s Law saved hospitals and insurers a lot of money. Should that money go to a senator who helped kill it?

This post is not a political endorsement. It is meant to call attention to the forces that affect victims of medical malpractice.

Earlier this year, New York legislators considered a bill that could have made it easier for countless victims of medical negligence to pursue compensation under the law. Despite widespread support, it was blocked – in large part by GOP senator and Health Committee Chairman Kemp Hannon.

Why would the chair of the Senate Health Committee oppose a bill that’s good for patients? According to the New York Daily News, It might have something to do with the powerful Greater New York Hospital Association, which loudly lobbied against the bill. The Association has formed a Super PAC that has spent nearly $200,000 on Senator Hannon’s behalf.

What can lead to medication mistakes at pharmacies?

Published on: October 19, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Medication errors can come about in many different ways. Sometimes, they happen as a result of mistakes made at pharmacies. Customers trust that pharmacies will get everything right when filling their prescription. Unfortunately, sometimes, this doesn’t happen. Incidents occasionally occur in which a pharmacist makes a mistake, such as a labeling error, a dosage error or an error involving giving out the wrong medication.

Several different things could increase a pharmacist’s likelihood of making these kinds of errors, including:

A pharmacist not focusing on the task at hand.
Lack of adequate staffing at a pharmacy.
Shortcomings when it comes to consultations.
Time pressures.
A particular heavy workload.
A high-stress work environment.
Overly confusing work systems at a pharmacy.

As one can see, when it comes to medication error prevention at pharmacies, there are a range of different things it can be important to address. So, for the sake of their customers, it is critical for pharmacists and pharmacies to keep the prevention of medication errors in the forefront in their various different actions and decisions.

Federal government sets big traffic safety goal

Published on: October 12, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

There are a variety of things the states and the federal government do to try to keep the nation’s roads safe. One is to issue various regulations aimed at crash prevention. Another is to issue traffic safety goals, and to initiate campaigns directed toward the achievement of such goals. Recently, the federal government set a goal that is quite large and ambitious.

This goal is to bring traffic deaths down to zero in the next 30 years. This joint goal of the U.S. Department of Transportation and the safety advocacy group the National Safety Council was announced last week.

There would be quite a long ways to go for this goal to be achieved. Traffic deaths are currently very far away from zero. In 2015, there were over 35,000 fatalities out on America’s roads. And recently, motor vehicle accident deaths have been trending up, not down.

Patient identification mistakes at hospitals

Published on: October 5, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Instances of a mistaken identity can happen in a lot of different environments. In some contexts, such errors at worse will result in some embarrassment. In others though, such mistakes could be quite harmful. For example, at health care facilities, a misidentification of a patient could seriously endanger the patient’s health.

Recently, an ECRI Institute report looked into patient identity errors. These are mistakes in which one patient is confused with another. The report looked at over 7,600 such errors that were voluntarily reported by health care organizations. These errors came from over 180 organizations. They occurred between January 2013 and July 2015. ECRI officials postulate that these cases likely make up only a small portion of the patient identity mistakes that actually occurred.

While most of the mistakes the report looked at did not result in a patient getting hurt, there were a couple that were fatal and some others that resulted in serious harms.

The impacts of increased concussion awareness

Published on: September 28, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Increased awareness regarding the concussion risks kids can face and the dangers head injuries can pose to children is a very important thing. It could help on several fronts. For one, it can help with encouraging proper prevention efforts in things like youth sports. Also, it could help increase the likelihood of kids who suffer a potentially concussion-causing head injury promptly getting the medical care they need.

Increased concussion awareness might be a contributor to a recent trend that has occurred when it comes to kids in the 10 to 19 age group. This trend is an increase in concussion diagnoses among such kids. This trend can be seen in recent Blue Cross and Blue Shield research.

The study, which looked at medical claims data, concluded that between 2010 and 2015, individuals 10 to 19 saw a 71 percent concussion diagnoses increase. The study also found an increase in such diagnoses among the 20 to 64 age group, but that increase was much more modest.

AI assistants may help doctors diagnose breast cancer

Published on: September 24, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

How new AI technology could save cancer patients

Doctors go through extensive training to learn to diagnose critical conditions such as cancer. But even the smartest, most diligent physicians make mistakes sometimes. According to the healthcare journal BMJ Quality and Safety, breast cancer is misdiagnosed up to 28 percent of the time. Some of these errors occur when physicians are reviewing breast biopsy samples. In the best conditions, pathologists can accurately identify breast cancer in these samples with 96 percent accuracy.

96 percent is pretty good, right? Objectively, yes, but we don’t think it’s good enough for the other four percent. That’s why we’re intrigued about a new technological development that could raise that number even high. Read on to learn more.

Paging Dr. Robot…

Researchers from Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) recently published a study about an artificial intelligence system trained to detect breast cancer. By “showing” the system hundreds of cancerous and noncancerous lymph node biopsies, they were able to teach it how to accurately detect cancer 92 percent of the time.

Determining whether a preterm birth was preventable

Published on: September 21, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

There are certain things it is generally best to steer clear of when it comes to a childbirth. One is a baby being born too far ahead of a due date. A premature birth (a birth that comes over three weeks earlier than the due date) can have a variety of risks associated with it.

This includes increased chances of the child developing harmful conditions in relation to the birth. A list of some of the complications babies can experience in connection to a premature birth can be found on our law firm’s page on preterm birth.

Sometimes, circumstances are such that medical professionals are powerless to prevent a birth from being premature. However, in other situations, there might be steps available to a doctor that could head off a potential premature birth, and help push the birth back to a time in which the baby is more developed and better able to handle the various things that go along with delivery.

When doctors give an incorrect MS diagnosis

Published on: September 15, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

A misdiagnosis can have many negative effects on a patient. One is a patient getting treatment for a condition they don’t actually have. Such unnecessary treatments can be problematic, particularly if they carry risks of severe side effects.

One medical condition that has treatments that can have major side effects is multiple sclerosis. So, avoiding MS misdiagnoses is very important. Unfortunately, this disease has certain aspects that can make it particularly prone to being diagnosed when it isn’t actually there.

For one, its symptoms can be similar to those of other conditions. Also, there currently aren’t objective biomarkers that can be tested for when it comes to this condition. So it could be easy, when proper care isn’t taken, for a doctor to mistake another condition for MS.

The challenges of enforcing distracted driving laws

Published on: September 9, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Despite its dangers, many people continue to go to their phones when driving. This is the case here in New York and throughout the country. Now, most states ban at least some types of cellphone use while driving, like texting. Additionally, some states, like New York, prohibit all types of handheld phone use behind the wheel. However, there are things that can make enforcing such laws difficult.

One big one is that this dangerous conduct can be hard for law enforcement officials to spot. There are various things distracted drivers might try to do to conceal their cellphone use. This includes holding their cellphone down low or putting their cellphone away the second they spot anything that looks like law enforcement.

These challenges have led some police departments to go to out-of-the-box methods for trying to catch distracted drivers. Examples include:

A common treatment doesn’t necessarily equal an effective one

Published on: August 31, 2016 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

When receiving a treatment that a doctor recommended, patients generally trust that the treatment is one that actually has the potential to help them with their particular medical condition. Unnecessary treatments can have negative consequences for patients, as some treatments can have risks associated with them that patients would be needlessly exposed to if they were given the treatment when it was not likely to have a positive effect. So, one would generally hope doctors would be taking evidence of effectiveness into account when deciding what treatments to recommend.

However, a recent article on the Washington Post’s website indicates that some treatments have remained common despite the fact that recent research had pointed to them not being as effective in as wide of range of circumstances as was initially thought. The three common treatments that the article identified as being in this category were:

Back pain injections.
Arthroscopic knee surgery.
Stents.

This does not mean that these treatments are never the right ones for a patient, rather it raises the possibility that they are perhaps being used more often than is needed. So, when it comes to recommending these types of treatments, or any type of treatment for that matter, one would hope doctors would carefully think about whether the treatment is likely to have a positive impact on the patient given available evidence and the patient’s unique circumstances, rather than just relying on things like the treatment being a relatively common one.