Outpatient Surgery Magazine

OR Excellence Award Winners - September 2017 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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tion of the wrong medication, a mistake in the post-surgical count of sponges or instruments, or the inaccurate or insufficient retelling of discharge instructions. The situation also presents a troublesome what-if scenario in the event of an adverse outcome. Let's say a patient came in for a colonoscopy and emerged from the procedure with a perforated bowel. If the physician had been using his phone within that time frame, the plaintiff's attorney may try to argue that the perforation resulted from the physician being interrupted by his phone while advancing the scope. As smartphone usage becomes more and more prevalent, attor- neys will find themselves armed with ample ammunition, even in cases where an adverse outcome is due to a common complication that occurs in the absence of negligence. • Patients and patient representatives. Any environment in which a patient may purposely or inadvertently record other patients or their protected health information — the PACU, for example — raises a serious privacy issue. Imagine if someone in your facility recorded an unflattering video of a patient emerging from anesthesia and posted it to social media. While patients are not bound to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, you may be legally responsible if a patient breaches another patient's privacy. So if you're going to let patients and their representatives use smart- phones, what's the appropriate context for usage? Some patients may tell you they want to record discharge instructions, which is understand- able considering the stress of surgery and the fact that they are likely emerging from conscious sedation or general anesthesia. A solution may be to usher the patient and his representative out of PACU and into another room, away from other patients, where they can safely record post-op instructions. Consider the well-known case from 2015, in which a Virginia man J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 7 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 1 4 5

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