Target Audience

Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nursing Officer, Compliance Officer, Joint Commission Coordinator, Quality Improvement personnel, Risk Manager, Legal Counsel.

Overview

This webinar will focus on the legal and risk management challenges that healthcare providers face while caring for patients in the high-risk environment of the Emergency Department (ED).

This session will instruct participants on how to comply with selected Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) hospital Conditions of Participation (CoPs) and Joint Commission standards often found to be problematic for Emergency Department staff. Examples of these challenges include how the visitation law affects the ED and the CMS anesthesia standards on the use of deep sedation or moderate sedation in the Emergency Department; CMS hospital requirements regarding the use of standing orders in the ED; as well as the issue of alarm fatigue and its impact in the ED including the Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goals and sentinel event alert.

The Joint Commission’s standard on patient centered communication will be discussed including the interpreter, low health literacy, and collecting race and ethnicity data in the ED.

Common medication errors that occur in the ED will be reviewed as well as how to avoid the errors initially. CMS made changes to medication management and opioid use, and this is currently an area where hospitals are still struggling to meet compliance.

Finally, the importance of discharge instructions will be covered as they are important to prevent unnecessary readmissions or returns to the ED.

Learning Objective
At the conclusion of this session, participants should be able to:

• Discuss legal and risk management issues in the Emergency Department (ED) and recommendations including how to reduce the most common medication errors that occur in the ED.
• Explain the importance of documenting the use of interpreters for patients with limited English proficiency.
• Describe that the visitation law requires the ED to give the patient written information on their rights including information on the hospital’s advance directive policy.

Speaker
Laura A. Dixon is the president of Healthcare Risk Education and Consulting. She previously served as the Director, Facility Patient Safety and Risk Management and Operations for COPIC from 2014 to 2020. In her role, Ms. Dixon provided consultation and training to facilities, practitioners and staff in multiple states.

Dixon has more than twenty years of clinical experience in acute care facilities, including critical care, coronary care, peri-operative services and pain management. Prior to joining COPIC, she served as the Director, Western Region, Patient Safety and Risk Management for The Doctors Company, Napa, California. In this capacity, she provided consultation to the physicians and staff for the western United States.

As a registered nurse and attorney, Laura holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Regis University, a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Drake University College of Law, and a Registered Nurse Diploma from Saint Luke’s School Professional Nursing. She is licensed to practice law in Colorado and California.

This speaker has no real or perceived conflicts of interest that relate to this presentation.