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The system in the US for protecting human participants in research engages the earnest efforts of thousands of scientists, community volunteers, and administrators. The Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) system is endangered by excessive paperwork and expanding obligations to oversee work that poses little risk to subjects. The result is that there is simultaneous overregulation and underprotection.

The Organ Transplantation Act issued by the Government of India 1994 has undergone major and minor changes in the form of addition of rules and amendments in order to improve the Act to make it much acceptable legally. Over a period of time, with an increase in cadaver organ donations, the rules and policies with regard to the same have been defined and redefined over the years. In this article, the Act, the rules, the amendments, the quick essentials of approach, and the forms are reviewed.

Referred to as Standard of Care, the legal duty of a dentist requires exercising the degree of skill and care that would be exhibited by other prudent dentists faced with the same patient-care situation. Primarily, the goal of keeping good dental records is to maintain continuity of care. Diligent and complete documentation and charting procedures are essential to fulfilling the Standard of Care. Secondly, because dental records are considered legal documents they help protect the interest of the dentist and/or the patient by establishing the details of the services rendered. Patients today are better educated and more assertive than ever before and dentists must be equipped to protect themselves against malpractice claims. Every record component must be handled as if it could be summoned to a court room and scrutinized by an attorney, judge or jury. Complete, accurate, objective and honest entries in a patient record are the only way to defend against any clinical and/or legal problems that might arise. Most medical and dental malpractice claims arise from an unfavorable interaction with the dentist and not from a poor treatment outcome. By implementing the suggestions mentioned in this course, dental health care professionals can minimize the legal risks associated with the delivery of dental care to promote greater understanding for patients of their rights and privileges to their complete record.

Context. —Practicing pathologists often encounter controversial clinical issues and nonstandardized laboratory approaches to the evolving science of predictive/prognostic tumor marker assays. This dilemma becomes especially acute when the assay is the sole determinant for selection of a specific therapy. Objectives. —To summarize the areas of practical agreement and identify opportunities for improvement in Her-2/ neu testing of breast cancer. Design. —The College of American Pathologists created a new comprehensive education model, called Strategic Science, with expert speakers integrating new and evolving basic, clinical, and scientific issues of Her-2/ neu testing with aspects of laboratory management. Setting. —Symposium held May 4 and 5, 2002, in Rosemont, Ill. Participants. —Ten speakers and more than 100 attendees. Results. —Components addressed were new technology assessment, practice guidelines, quality assurance, regulatory compliance, risk and liability, billing and coding, cost analysis, consultation, information management, and results reporting. Conclusions. —This Strategic Science symposium derived areas of practical agreement, defined the current state-of-the-art, and identified areas for improvement in Her-2/ neu testing.

Key Points Endodontics is an area of dentistry which gives rise to an increasing amount of complaints and litigation. Warning patients about the risks associated with endodontics is an important part of obtaining valid consent. Where treatment will be complex a referral to a specialist should be offered. Endodontic procedures are challenging and technically demanding. In the UK standards of treatment have been shown to have fallen short of acceptable guidelines, laying many dentists open to litigation on questions of clinical negligence by patients who understand and know what should be considered as current best practice in this area. Failure to communicate with patients about the procedure and not obtaining consent for treatment is a key area of complaint, as is inadequate record keeping. When treatment is undertaken within the framework of accepted guidelines it would be very difficult for a patient to open a claim for clinical negligence should a failure occur. This article looks at potential dento-legal problems in endodontics and how, through compliance with best practice, they may be avoided.

Medical identity theft has become increasingly prevalent. Medical practices need to take action and have policies and procedures in place to prevent data breaches. This will protect both the patient and the practice from medical identity theft.

Background: Federal regulation requires hospitals to present patients with a Notice of Privacy Practices (NPP) that contains all stipulated content items, is readable by patients, and posted on institutional web sites. Objective: The objective of this study was to determine whether the NPP texts contain the required content, if readability is influenced by local literacy rates, and if readability or the presentation of NPP texts in other languages is influenced by local rates of English proficiency. Research Design: The authors conducted a cross-sectional study of the web sites of 115 hospitals selected from the US News and World Report list: Best Hospitals in America. Measures: English NPP texts were evaluated for 18 content items and readability using the Flesch-Kincaid scale, which assigns the minimal grade level required to read a text (range, 0-16). Results: NPP texts were available for all hospitals (115 of 115). A Spanish-language NPP was available for 25% (29 of 115). All content items were evident in 76% (87 of 115) of hospitals' NPP texts. The average grade-level readability of NPP text was 12.3 (95% confidence interval, 12.0-12.7). Readability was not associated with the rate of local literacy (P = 0.07). Hospitals with a lower local rate of English proficiency had NPP texts that were more difficult to read (P = 0.03) and did not present NPP texts in other languages more frequently (P = 0.15). Conclusions: Although NPP texts typically cover the stipulated content, they are written beyond the reading capacity of the majority of American adults. Explicit federal guidance is needed to help privacy lawyers draft NPP texts that are both comprehensive and comprehensible. The goals of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 Privacy Rule cannot be met with NPP texts patients cannot decipher.

Overviews legal and other provisions to protect the privacy of patients in NZ. Refers to privacy breaches in other sectors. Outlines records management tools used in NZ district health boards (DHBs) to ensure that electronic transactions searches are being used appropriately. Advises nurses on the importance of safeguarding their professional integrity. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.

Improving Access to and Confidentiality of Research Data summarizes a workshop convened by the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) to promote discussion about methods for advancing the often conflicting goals of exploiting the research potential of microdata and maintaining acceptable levels of confidentiality. This report outlines essential themes of the access versus confidentiality debate that emerged during the workshop. Among these themes are the tradeoffs and tensions between the needs of researchers and other data users on the one hand and confidentiality requirements on the other; the relative advantages and costs of data perturbation techniques (applied to facilitate public release) versus restricted access as tools for improving security; and the need to quantify disclosure risks-both absolute and relative-created by researchers and research data, as well as by other data users and other types of data.