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Features
Recent rulings of interest to you and your practice.
As we have discussed in Parts One and Two, there are many well-understood reasons medical mistakes are made ' lack of communication between providers and patients, inattention to detail, placing profit above patient care, and so forth.If we examine all these reasons for medical negligence while looking specifically at health care providers ' why a particular practitioner makes a mistake ' I find that mistakes often happen because doctors, nurses and others in the medical professions 'are' who they are, as people. It is a 'people phenomenon' ' a function of personality that manifests itself in the way a person works.
Features
On Jan. 18, 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a final rule to revise the required format of prescription drug labels so as to enable physicians to find the information they need more readily. New features include a section called 'Highlights' and a Table of Contents. According to the FDA's press release, this is the first time in 25 years that the labeling requirements have undergone a major revision.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) (42 U.S.C.A ' 1320d) was enacted by Congress in 1996 and took effect on April 14, 2003. Although it was originally intended to increase access to health care by expanding insurance portability and renewability, privacy issues evolved due to developing technology that provided easy access to health information. As a result, Congress added additional safeguards to the seemingly innocuous Act. Such procedural safeguards have spawned a debate on whether HIPAA preempts state privacy laws, and if so, whether it prohibits ex parte communications between a plaintiff's treating physicians and defense counsel. Therefore, it's important for counsel to be aware of the various state and federal court decisions on the subject and the issues raised by both plaintiffs and defendants in this amorphous area of law.
Numerous studies and articles document the alarming increase during the last few years in the size of settlements in securities class action lawsuits. As a result, directors, officers, insurers, brokers, and others focus almost exclusively on securities class actions when evaluating risks and structuring D&O insurance programs. Although largely ignored in that analysis, shareholder derivative lawsuits are also very important liability exposures particularly for directors since directors are named as defendants in derivative suits far more frequently than in securities class actions and since settlements and judgments in derivative suits are usually not indemnifiable by the company.
National cases of interest to you and your practice.
Unfortunately, attempting to achieve the worthy goal of increasing workplace diversity through ad hoc decisions that advance women or minorities, often made in the absence of, or without strict adherence to, a formal affirmative action plan, can spawn claims of illegal reverse discrimination. Such claims appear to be on the rise.
