Archive for July, 2010
Friday, July 16th, 2010
Also see the Satellite Edition of this week’s update with more news over at ER Stories.
Making an appointment to have an emergency. California emergency department lets patients schedule emergency department appointments online to “alleviate crowded emergency rooms.” Patients who schedule online are guaranteed to be seen within 15 minutes of their appointment time. There’s a catch, though. The service costs $24.99, which pretty much guarantees that the patients using the service aren’t indigent … and also increases the likelihood that the hospital will be compensated for the medical services it provides. Nice marketing idea.
All you patients that can’t afford to fork over $25 for an “emergency appointment” — you just sit and wait in line with all the other poor people.
Fast care, quality care, free care. Pick any two.
Six hour emergency department wait blamed for 25 year old patient’s death from a pulmonary embolism. Now the hospital is being sued for $2 million.
In other news, hospital responds by naming all people in waiting room in a contribution action.
One of eight emergency department visits is for a mental health or substance abuse problem. Of those 12 million patients, 41% are admitted, which is more than twice the national average for medical problems. Half of those patients had either Medicare or Medicaid. Looks like a primary care shortage isn’t the only thing that is going to bankrupt the system.
How fat are you? Pretty soon everyone’s going to know. Federal mandates will require that you Body Mass Index, or BMI, be included on all electronic medical records and uploaded to a national exchange. Next up: How many times have you picked at your ingrown toenail?
At least some hospitals are getting the idea: Take care of your staff. With the incidence of violence against emergency healthcare workers on the rise, Maine hospitals are creating ways to make their employees safer. One hospital outfits employees with Star Trek-like communicators to summon help immediately when patients become unruly. Another hospital purchased a TASER for the emergency department. As far as I’m concerned, there is no excuse for a hospital administration to put emergency healthcare personnel in a situation where they have to defend themselves against violence without giving them the means to do so.
Police get guns, pepper spray, and bullet proof vests. Emergency personnel get saline flushes, Press Ganey scores, and JCAHO.
If the case goes to court, whatever you do – don’t appeal the ruling. US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas’ nephew becomes “emotionally unstable” after emergency physician asks him to put on a hospital gown. When he tries to leave the hospital, he is allegedly beaten and TASERed by New Orleans emergency department security personnel.
What’s with the aversion to hospital gowns? Intoxicated New Jersey dad gets brought to hospital after domestic dispute. When asked to put on a hospital gown, he tried to leave, was restrained, and was sedated. Shortly afterwards, he went into cardiac arrest and died.
University Medical Center internists, family practitioners, and geriatricians stop taking Medicare patients. All the community doctors stopped taking Medicare, so the patients migrated to the university centers. Now the universities are dropping Medicare. Don’t worry, though! The patients have INSURANCE!
The United States isn’t the only country with an emergency department crisis. In the last two years, 235 Japanese hospitals have closed their emergency departments, citing “unprofitablity.” Docs in the emergency departments are only paid 4 Euros per hour. Hospitals routinely refuse to accept patients in ambulances. In 2007, more than 1000 ambulances were turned away by at least 10 hospitals. Now people die in ambulances before they can find care. Funny how Japan’s insurance doesn’t mean much without access to care, either.
Israeli hospitals are getting full, too. Multiple hospitals are at 120 percent or more of capacity. The Israeli Health Ministry routinely closes down different hospital departments to new admissions. One trauma unit was closed for new admissions 90 times in 18 months. Israeli patients spent a total of 70,000 days in hospital hallways due to a lack of available patient beds.
Can you say “amoxicillin for snot noses?” More than half of pediatricians make diagnostic errors “at least once or twice a month” and almost half make errors that cause harm to patients at least once a year – and even those errors are probably under reported.
System-related errors, organizational issues, or communication problems were deemed the most common contributing factors for diagnostic error.
Poor care coordination, lack of teamwork, and lack of communication were rated the most important system-related factors.
Close follow-up of patients was ranked as the provider-based solution most likely to be effective. Access to electronic medical records was ranked as the system process most likely to be effective.
So what if some docs can’t understand that viruses don’t respond to antibiotics. They can sure ban the heck out of childrens’ cold remedies, can’t they?
Bedbug causes closure of New York City emergency department triage room for “fumigation.”
In other news, members of the National Bedbug Association threatened a lawsuit. Chapter president Deborah Peel was quoted as saying “You don’t see them pulling this kind of stuff with mosquitoes or pubic lice, do you? It’s insect profiling. Plain and simple.”
Cleveland should have made this part of its pitch to LeBron James. Dengue fever is making the rounds in the Florida Keys and is expected to spread to the Miami area. Watch out for them skeeters!
Posted in Healthcare Update | 5 Comments »
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
For the first time ever, I went to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for Vicodin.
What a strange experience.
I actually felt weird passing the prescription to the pharmacist.
She looked at the prescription, then looked me up and down.
“What is your address, sir?”
I gave her my address. No I’m not coming from out of town to fill a script at a new pharmacy to avoid getting busted.
“OK, give me about 20 minutes.”
I watched her go to the computer and start typing. The screen was angled away from the customers, but I could see the reflection of the screen off of one of the signs behind the counter. Sure enough. She went to the computer and pulled up the state web site where all of the narcotic prescriptions are listed.
Heh! Not on there, am I?
Another good thing about not living where you work. None of the pharmacists know who you are.
I wandered around the store for a while going back and forth in my head.
“Dang. Half the cold medicines are behind the counter now. Meth heads rule.”
“Do I look like a drug seeker?”
“If I wore a suit and tie, would she still have given me that look? She was prolly just checking out my rippling pecs under my T-shirt.”
“How do the real drug seekers look when they come up to the counter, anyway? Do they limp in with a pained expression on their faces, limp away from the pharmacy counter when their prescription is filled, and then hop up in the air and kick their feet together once they get outside the pharmacy with their prescription in hand?”
“Is there a Press-Ganey for pharmacies?”
“Do pharmacy chain managers give pharmacists the same line about making all the customers happy all the time – even if they are abusing drugs?”
“Do the pharmacy managers even know how to check a drug interaction?”
“Would I even be worried about any of this if I wasn’t an ED physician?”
“Mr. WhiteCoat to the pharmacy counter, please.”
Wow. Twenty cents a pill for pain relief. Same pills go for a good ten bucks each at a nightclub for a fix (or so I’m told).
With that kind of mark up I can see why some frequent flyers are so persistent.
Posted in Random Thoughts | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
 OK, I’m thinking we need a STAT consult from Walter Olsen at Overlawyered.com. If his blog isn’t on your list of daily reads, it should be.
A Muslim woman named Rona Mohammedi comes to the Somerset Medical Center emergency department with “severe chest pain.” She refuses to get undressed in front of a strange man so that EKG leads could be applied to her body in order to see whether she was having a heart attack. Already JCAHO is going to have a field day with this case.
Apparently the patient demanded that a woman perform the EKG and no women technicians were available. The patient waited in the emergency department for five hours before leaving against medical advice and going to another hospital. Now she is suing the first hospital for discrimination and for violating the patient’s bill of rights.
In the linked article, the author of a book on Muslim women’s civil rights says that “a number” of such lawsuits have been filed and some settlements and compromises have been reached.
If you undress the patient against her will, you’re sued for assault and for violating her religious rights.
If you don’t undress the patient, you’re sued for discrimination.
If you don’t undress the patient and you miss a medical problem, you’re sued for malpractice.
Kind of like bringing your car to a mechanic and threatening to sue him if he opens the hood, but also threatening to sue him if he doesn’t fix your car.
Yes, the patient’s initial request was only for a female EKG technician. But what if there were no female nurses? Or no female doctors? Or no female radiology technicians? Is the patient going to dress back up after her EKG and refuse further examination?
What if the EKG showed an acute MI? Thrombolytics and cath lab on hold until we can find an all-female staff?
If Jehovah’s Witnesses can refuse blood transfusions and then accept the responsibility for their actions, Muslim women who refuse to disrobe in the emergency department should do the same. This woman and her lawyer should be forced to reimburse the hospital for having to defend this frivolous lawsuit.
This case is another example of why we need to begin using video cameras to capture interactions in emergency department examination rooms.
By the way, does anyone know whether or not Muslim women are allowed to wear hijabs in prision? Or in court?
UPDATE JULY 15, 2010
First, thanks to Jenn and Muhammad for answering my questions in the comments section. Their answers and a comment on the New Jersey newspaper’s web site raise another important issue.
A commenter on the newspaper’s web site stated that “Rona’s husband is a NY Attorney, and the attorney covering the case is a partner in his law firm. This is probably more a case of entitlement and arrogance as opposed to the Hospital not respecting their religious rights.”
I checked for attorneys with the last name of “Mohammedi” on Martindale.com and wasn’t able to find an attorney in NY or in NJ with that last name. However, using Google, I did find an attorney named Omar Mohammedi who works in the NYC Commission on Human Rights who is the president of the New York Area Muslim Bar Association.
If what Jenn and Muhammad are saying is true regarding Muslim religious requirements, then it raises a question in my mind whether this patient may have purposely misstated the requirements of her religion so that she could get preferential treatment or possibly even as a pretense so that she could file a lawsuit.
If the patient really did overstate the requirements of her religion, Somerset Medical Center and any doctors named in the lawsuit should be filing their own lawsuit against the patient for fraud and filing ethics charges against her attorney and her attorney’s law firm for perpetuating the fraud.
Come to think of it, maybe they should file the lawsuit anyway and let a jury decide what really happened. That’s what lawsuits are for, right? Resolving disputes?
Posted in Medical-Legal, News Commentary | 33 Comments »
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
 A patient in her early 70′s was brought in by ambulance for difficulty breathing. She had been a smoker all of her life and her lungs were clearly wearing out on her.
After the patient arrived, a daughter teetered up to the registration desk and asked if she could see her mother. The smell of whiskey on her breath was unmistakable. The daughter went back to the room and sat with her mother for a little while as the smell of Jim Beam wafted through the air. We informed her that things with her mother weren’t looking good.
As the respiratory therapist tried to work his magic, the patient’s daughter got up and teetered back out of the room.
The respiratory therapist’s “healing vapors” had no effect. None of our efforts were improving the patient’s condition, so we went out to the waiting room to tell the family that the patient was getting worse and to ask them about the patient’s wishes for being on a ventilator.
No family members were in the waiting room.
The family was paged overhead in the hospital. No answer.
An aide went to the cafeteria. Not there.
We called the daughter’s cell phone number. Disconnected.
Security went outside to see if they were smoking. Ah HA! They weren’t standing across the street smoking like most of the other hospital visitors (and many patients) do. Instead, the daughter, another woman, and two males were sitting in a car – with the daughter in the driver’s seat – passing around a bottle of Seagram’s. The car was filled with smoke like a scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Well, Ms. Spicoli, when you finish with your bottle, you might want to come be with your mother.
Traditionally, wakes don’t start until after the patient dies.
Posted in Patient Encounters | 9 Comments »
Monday, July 12th, 2010
 Revealing article in Bloomberg online today about the latest way in which elderly patients are getting screwed by the system.
Medicare reviews all admissions and if the patients don’t meet indications for admission, the hospital doesn’t get paid by Medicare. Medicare has also recently implemented a mercenary system called Recovery Audit Contractors (or RAC for short) in which third parties audit hospital charts to see whether Medicare “overpaid” for a patient’s visit. If the auditor finds an “overpayment”, the auditor gets to keep a percentage of that overpayment. Just as an aside, most states have laws against percentage “fee splitting” such as this since paying someone on a percentage basis creates a conflict of interest that encourages the contractors to do things to enhance their income.
Hospitals have the ability to classify Medicare patients as an “observation” admission during the patients’ stay. “Observation” admissions are apparently paid at a lower rate, but don’t come under as much Medicare scrutiny. Additionally, under Medicare rules, “observation” patients may have to pay a 20% co-payment that wouldn’t be required if they were admitted. Medicare “observation” patients also have to pay full price for any subsequent care that is rendered after they have been discharged. For example, if a Medicare patient needs a nursing home care or physical therapy after a hospital stay, Medicare will pay if the patient has been admitted for three days or longer and will not pay if the patient is classified as an “observation” stay. The Bloomberg article gives an example of one 76 year old patient who was saddled with more than $36,000 in bills based on his “observation” stay for eight days.
Another 90 year old woman was billed more than $11,000 after fracturing her hip and then undergoing five weeks of physical therapy so that she could walk again. Sorry, grandma, you weren’t admitted. You were only “observation.” Pay up.
If a patient is a borderline case, hospitals appear to be leaning toward keeping patients in “observation” status. The number of patients receiving the “observation” designation doubled between 2006 and 2008.
Also note how Medicare is planning to penalize hospitals that re-admit too many patients, which will only increase the number of patients classified as “observation” status.
On one hand, hospitals get paid more for admitting Medicare patients.
On the other hand, hospitals could be accused of false claims and penalized for admitting Medicare patients who don’t meet Medicare’s strict admission criteria. Medicare’s RAC mercenaries will be combing through charts because they have a financial incentive to find patients who have been “inappropriately” classified as “admissions.”
So hospitals play it safe and classify more and more Medicare patients as “observation” status.
Who gets stuck in the middle?
The patients … many of whom worked their lives and paid into a system so that they would have medical care when they reached age 65.
Now they’re finding that they only have “insurance.”
Posted in Funding Crisis, Medicare | 15 Comments »
Saturday, July 10th, 2010
Hey All, it’s ERP from ER stories doing a quick guest post.
The myriad of ways that the staff entertains themselves late at night when there is a lull in the action is boundless. In fact, White Coat has blogged about this.
There is the “Obituary Game” made famous on Nurse Jackie but widely known to have been stolen from Nurse K. (reading the Obits and taking bets on who the deceased was and what the cause of death was based on their name)
There was “Cane Ball” which we used to play in the ambulance bay in residency (basically stick ball using a cane and a ball of tape).
Saline battles with pre-filled non-sterile flush syringes. (They squirt pretty damn far!)
Recently, we had a sort of “What would it take” game between some docs and PA’s. Of course it rapidly degenerated into a sexual theme. Sort of “how much would it take for you to sleep with so and so?” or “Would you sleep with so and so, if….?” Basically we found quite a variation in tolerances between us.
It mostly revolved around a fairly revolting surgeon at our hospital who is both unattractive physically, lecherous and creepy, and grossly unethical. What we discovered was that the amount required by the women was a minimum of 500,000 dollars providing he wore a paper bag over his head!
A variation of this was “Would you Rather?” where you have to make a choice between two very unpleasant options – basically the lesser of two evils. Some choices we were given:
Would you rather fracture your penis or your femur? (I chose the femur)
Would you rather get pancreatic cancer or glioblastoma? (I chose GBM)
Would you rather get a chest tube or a DPL with no Lidocaine? (I chose the DPL)
And of course the old classic, Would you rather be beautiful and stupid or brilliant and hideous? Man, that’s a tough one!
Anyone else have any good late night time-killing games?
Tags: ERP
Posted in Funny | 10 Comments »
Friday, July 9th, 2010
Should same sex partner of malpractice victim be entitled to a $2.45 million judgment?
Man walks into Cleveland Clinic-affiliated emergency department and shoots himself in chest.
Think that’s bad? Daytona Beach man walks into hospital emergency department and sets himself on fire.
“Health overhaul may mean longer ER waits, crowding“. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney gasps and says “you don’t say!”
Emergency departments seeing an increase in prescription drug overdoses. In 2008 there were almost a million visits for prescription drug abuse – as many as for overdoses of heroin, cocaine, and other illegal drugs combined. That’s a 111% increase in three years.
What father’s day present caused good ol’ dad to end up in the emergency department? From the article, it sounds like the kids probably should have gotten good ol’ dad a different present.
Now that everyone has “insurance,” it’s time for the insurance companies to twist the thumb screws. Insurance companies in Philadelphia area routinely “downcode” short hospital stays costing hospitals millions of dollars per year in revenues. One hospital notes that 10-15% of all its admissions are routinely downcoded by insurance companies — after the patient has received medical care, of course.
LAC/USC Hospital “upgrades” to smaller hospital with 200 less beds in 2008. You already know where this is headed. Now LA County supervisors are concerned because the hospital’s emergency department was deemed “overcrowded” about 80% of the month of May and conditions were considered “severe or dangerous” for half of that month. Supervisors are now looking to re-expand the hospital and have no funding sources to do so. Without extra staffing – which you can’t afford, either – you better just make the expansion one huge waiting room, because patients aren’t going to get care any faster.
Fresno, CA 10 month old found to be under the influence of meth? Mom and dad have some ‘splainin’ to do.
Entertaining, but bizarre story about a writer’s imaginary trip to the emergency department. Thought it was true at first, but then the end of the story got a lit-tle weird.
Will Obamacare have positive effect on medical malpractice? Some insurance actuaries think so. “Since hospitals will get penalized if they have a large proportion of re-admissions, this may motivate them to provide better care, which would result in more favorable outcomes and fewer claims.”
OK what will really happen if you pinch hospitals to discharge patients more quickly and also penalize them for re-admissions? The hospitals will find additional diseases while in the hospital that justify prolonged admission. Then, after discharge, if they come back to the emergency department for treatment, hospitals will pressure the emergency departments to treat and release the patients so that hospitals can avoid the penalty … as in daily trips from the nursing home to the emergency department via ambulance for management. Wonder what that will do to overcrowding in the emergency departments.
What happens when hospitals try to reduce costs? They hire more physician extenders “causing less-trained care providers to look at more complicated health issues.”
This whole payment/loophole thing is a mousetrap/mouse issue … and there are some pretty smart mice who will find loopholes to make sure that they are compensated for the services they provide. When the loopholes all vanish, so will many of the providers.
Things are going to get ugly, folks.
Survival skills for the emergency department … a HuffPo journalist laments over his 10 hour emergency department visit in the University of Chicago Hospital.
More temporary closures of Canadian emergency departments as there are insufficient physicians available.
Posted in Healthcare Update | 1 Comment »
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
After seeing Mrs. WhiteCoat argue on the phone with Medco representatives for 20 minutes about why one of her 80+ year old patients hadn’t received her medicine despite three lost faxes to Medco, I had to write this post to let the public know what is going on with some mail order pharmacies.
If you’re like most Americans, you want to try to save some money. One of the ways that patients can save money is by cutting prescription costs.
Enter Medco. Medco is a mail-order pharmacy that receives prescriptions by mail or by facsimile and then sends patients their prescriptions by mail. Often, the prescriptions are for a three month supply of medications. By having warehouses instead of multiple “brick and mortar” retail buildings, Medco can save costs and presumably undercut the competition. An analogy might be that Medco is the “Netflix” of the pharmaceutical industry.
With the cheap prices come problems, though.
We probably see a couple of patients a month in the emergency department who have run out of medications because their shipment from Medco or some other mail order pharmacy hasn’t arrived. Most of the time the patients can’t get into see their family physicians and are just requesting a week or two worth of pills to “carry them over” until they get their shipment. Some patients try to split pills or take their medications every other day in order to hold out as long as they can.
Mrs. WhiteCoat is a family physician and she sees the other side of the Medco problem. When she faxes renewals for her patients’ prescriptions, her faxes are routinely lost. Doesn’t matter that she has a confirmation sheet. Medco makes her dig up the chart and re-send the renewal. Many times, she only finds out about the non-receipt of her faxes after her patients call her in a panic because they have called Medco’s customer service center, were told that no renewal was received, and are almost out of their medications.
Mrs. WhiteCoat also regularly gets faxes from Medco requesting that she change her patients’ prescriptions to a “preferred” medication. Unless she signs them and faxes them back, then calls to confirm with a pharmacist (not another physician) that patients really need the medication she prescribed, Medco won’t release the prescription and the patients don’t get their medication.
What’s the big deal – it’s only 5 or 10 minutes, right? Wrong. Many times it is more. Not too long ago, Mrs. WhiteCoat’s nurse was on the phone for 80 minutes getting prescriptions straightened out for 4 patients. That was time that the nurse couldn’t help patients in Mrs. WhiteCoat’s office and represented a loss of almost an hour and a half of the nurse’s salary to Mrs. WhiteCoat. Even if it is only 5 minutes, if you multiply 5-10 minutes times hundreds of patients, you end up with a significant amount of time each month of phone tag, waiting on hold during uncompensated phone calls, and hoops to jump through – just to get your patients their medications.
The mail order pharmacies may actually cost patients more money in the long run. If patients can’t reach their physician and have to come to the emergency department or urgent care center when Medco doesn’t get them their prescriptions in time then they may have to pay a copay or other out of pocket expenses for the extra doctor visit because of Medco shenanigans.
So if there is a mix-up in paperwork … or if Medco conveniently doesn’t get the faxed prescription for a patient’s medications (even though the physician has a confirmation page showing that the fax went through successfully) … or if Medco pharmacists think another medication might be better for you than the one that your physician prescribed … you just might not get your medications before you run out.
If you don’t get your blood pressure medications and you have a stroke … well at least you saved a few bucks on your prescriptions – when you finally get them.
So a question for the attorneys: Suppose an insurer or employer’s health plan only allows their enrollees to get these mail order prescriptions. No prescriptions from local pharmacies or national chains allowed. Now suppose that a patient has a stroke because they didn’t get their medication refill in time.
Can the insurer or employer be held liable for contracting solely with a company that is suspect in its duties?
Posted in Health | 37 Comments »
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
 Nurse [as she was walking out of the Dirty Utility room]: “Where’s the timer for the pregnancy tests?”
Secretary: “Oh, the lady from lab threw it out. It was expired.”
Nurse: “Wait. She came to our department and threw something in our department out? And she said that the timer expired?”
Secretary: “Yeah. She said that it could be a JCAHO violation if we were using an expired timer.”
Nurse: “It’s a f**king clock. How does a clock expire?”
Secretary: “Ask the ‘Lab Nazi.’”
We have to keep a timer in the Dirty Utility Room (which happens to be one of the many ROOMS in the emergency DEPARTMENT) so that pregnancy tests are read at precisely 3 minutes. If they are not read at 3 minutes, that could be a JCAHO violation because patient safety could suffer.
Now companies are apparently putting expiration dates on electronic equipment to assure patient safety. If electronic equipment is used past its expiration date, that could be a JCAHO violation.
They still haven’t replaced the timer in the Dirty Utility Room, so we’re officially screwed if the hospital gets inspected, but I also can’t verify whether these damn things have expiration dates on them. I need to know if anyone else out there has electronic equipment with expiration dates on it in the hospital. If so, please send me pictures. If anyone has any kind of proof about expiration of hospital electronics, I’d also appreciate it if you’d send me a copy so I can post it.
I am getting to the point that I want to become a JCAHO inspector just to mess with people’s heads. Imagine how much fun it would be to look at a chair, point at it, say it is expired, and then get 5 college graduates with advanced degrees to trip over each other in order to get rid of the chair. There’s probably some JCAHO internal message board somewhere with a Top 10 list of dumb things that surveyors got hospital admins to do.
All you medical supply companies – take note. You can increase your profits exponentially by putting an expiration date on all your equipment. Medical computers expire in 3 years. TVs used in hospitals expire in 2 years. Construction companies – chisel an expiration date in the hospitals you build. Ten years ought to do it.
Who gets to make up the rules that JCAHO follows, anyway?
Posted in Joint Commission | 26 Comments »
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Don’t Eyeball Me
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010A Muslim woman named Rona Mohammedi comes to the Somerset Medical Center emergency department with “severe chest pain.” She refuses to get undressed in front of a strange man so that EKG leads could be applied to her body in order to see whether she was having a heart attack. Already JCAHO is going to have a field day with this case.
Apparently the patient demanded that a woman perform the EKG and no women technicians were available. The patient waited in the emergency department for five hours before leaving against medical advice and going to another hospital. Now she is suing the first hospital for discrimination and for violating the patient’s bill of rights.
In the linked article, the author of a book on Muslim women’s civil rights says that “a number” of such lawsuits have been filed and some settlements and compromises have been reached.
If you undress the patient against her will, you’re sued for assault and for violating her religious rights.
If you don’t undress the patient, you’re sued for discrimination.
If you don’t undress the patient and you miss a medical problem, you’re sued for malpractice.
Kind of like bringing your car to a mechanic and threatening to sue him if he opens the hood, but also threatening to sue him if he doesn’t fix your car.
Yes, the patient’s initial request was only for a female EKG technician. But what if there were no female nurses? Or no female doctors? Or no female radiology technicians? Is the patient going to dress back up after her EKG and refuse further examination?
What if the EKG showed an acute MI? Thrombolytics and cath lab on hold until we can find an all-female staff?
If Jehovah’s Witnesses can refuse blood transfusions and then accept the responsibility for their actions, Muslim women who refuse to disrobe in the emergency department should do the same. This woman and her lawyer should be forced to reimburse the hospital for having to defend this frivolous lawsuit.
This case is another example of why we need to begin using video cameras to capture interactions in emergency department examination rooms.
By the way, does anyone know whether or not Muslim women are allowed to wear hijabs in prision? Or in court?
UPDATE JULY 15, 2010
First, thanks to Jenn and Muhammad for answering my questions in the comments section. Their answers and a comment on the New Jersey newspaper’s web site raise another important issue.
A commenter on the newspaper’s web site stated that “Rona’s husband is a NY Attorney, and the attorney covering the case is a partner in his law firm. This is probably more a case of entitlement and arrogance as opposed to the Hospital not respecting their religious rights.”
I checked for attorneys with the last name of “Mohammedi” on Martindale.com and wasn’t able to find an attorney in NY or in NJ with that last name. However, using Google, I did find an attorney named Omar Mohammedi who works in the NYC Commission on Human Rights who is the president of the New York Area Muslim Bar Association.
If what Jenn and Muhammad are saying is true regarding Muslim religious requirements, then it raises a question in my mind whether this patient may have purposely misstated the requirements of her religion so that she could get preferential treatment or possibly even as a pretense so that she could file a lawsuit.
If the patient really did overstate the requirements of her religion, Somerset Medical Center and any doctors named in the lawsuit should be filing their own lawsuit against the patient for fraud and filing ethics charges against her attorney and her attorney’s law firm for perpetuating the fraud.
Come to think of it, maybe they should file the lawsuit anyway and let a jury decide what really happened. That’s what lawsuits are for, right? Resolving disputes?
Posted in Medical-Legal, News Commentary | 33 Comments »