According to Courthouse News Service, more than 100 medical malpractice lawsuits were brought against Kaiser Foundation hospitals in 2013 alone. While neither the foundation nor Kaiser Permanente operates in Missouri or Kansas, this is of major concern because the group is the nation’s largest health care system, operating in nine states and Washington, D.C. One recent claim involves allegations...
Read MoreAn Oregon couple has filed a lawsuit against a Portland-area hospital operated by the Kaiser Foundation after a woman was allegedly sent home with a prescription painkiller instead of being diagnosed with a catastrophic brain injury. They accuse the hospital and the responsible physicians of failing to perform appropriate tests that would have discovered her epidural hematoma before it...
Read MoreIn April 2012, a 77-year-old Seattle musician and U.S. Army veteran died at a VA hospital after a long struggle with throat cancer. He had come to the hospital for end-of-life care but, tragically, it wasn’t his cancer that killed him. He died on his second night in the hospital from a massive morphine overdose. An Infusomat pain medication...
Read MoreThe tragedy happened in 2009: a couple went to Memorial Hospital of Carbondale in Southern Illinois for the birth of their son. According to legal papers, test showed everything was fine when the mom arrived at the hospital. Beginning at about 40 minutes before his birth and continuing until 10 minutes afterward, the baby was deprived of oxygen. He...
Read MoreHaving tonsils removed is a relatively common childhood experience. When children suffer from chronic infections, inflammation or an obstruction that impedes their ability to breathe or swallow, many doctors recommend a routine tonsillectomy and, perhaps removal of a related set of tissues called adenoids. Tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies are indeed routine — some 400,000 are performed a year, mostly on...
Read MoreWhen researchers at Baylor University began their recent study, their goal was to identify which techniques used to help rehabilitate people with traumatic brain injuries were most effective. They set out to analyze the outcomes for patients at 21 rehabilitation centers using the Traumatic Brain Injury Model System, or TBIMS, measuring the patents’ progress at the time of discharge...
Read MoreAn Illinois jury has awarded a family $15.55 million in compensation for a medical mistake that cost the life of a mother during a C-section in 2008. The father had sued MacNeal Hospital, an OB/Gyn at that hospital, the University of Chicago Medical Center and a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who works there after the two doctors failed to diagnose...
Read MoreThe Food and Drug Administration has just issued a surprising new warning about two drugs doctors commonly use to diagnose cardiovascular disease: they may themselves cause heart attacks. The two drugs, called Lexiscan and Adenoscan, are injected before stress tests to diagnose coronary artery disease. The American Heart Association describes a stress test as one intended to gauge heart...
Read MoreIn 2007, a new mom and her infant son were set for discharge from the hospital less than 48 hours after the birth. That’s not uncommon. The baby had a case of jaundice, which characterized by yellowing skin and eyes caused by the build-up of a naturally-occurring blood product called bilirubin, which some babies can’t metabolize at first. That’s...
Read MoreEngineers and cardiology researchers at Johns Hopkins University have designed a new biosensor that could help prevent serious brain injuries during heart surgery. The new device is still in development, but the researchers found that a prototype of the biosensor was successfully able to detect a protein associated with brain injury and alert surgeons to the problem. Cardiac surgery...
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