Hospital Liability: Drawing a Fine Line with Informed Consent in Today's Evolving Health Care Arena

Reducing liability risk through informed consent.

A new report by the American Medical Association reveals why medical liability claims are so devastating and costly for America's doctors: just over 42% of all physicians and an astonishing 57% of physicians in surgical subspecialties have been sued. Nearly 61% of physicians aged 55 or older have faced the ordeal of a lawsuit. But what if the specter of litigation could be reduced through bette...

The Quality of Informed Consent Obtaining Before Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Report From a Referral, Academic Hospital

Background: In patients undergoing Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), obtaining written Informed Consent (IC) must be the standard measure before the procedure. The patient must be informed about the risks and benefits of the treatment and alternatives. Objectives: We aimed to investigate the quality of IC obtaining before the ECT course in an academic hospital in the North of Iran. Material...

Informed consent, comparative effectiveness, and learning health care.

Interest in learning health care systems and in comparative-effectiveness research (CER) is exploding. One major question is whether informed consent should always be required for randomized comparative-effectiveness studies, particularly studies conducted in a learning health care system. Our answer to this question is no. It will often be unethical to go forward with CER in which patients are...

Informed consent in rheumatology care practice.

Informed consent is a mandatory document in human subject research protocols. Its principles have been recently established in the history of Medicine, and the first official document to establish the need for an informed consent from the research subject was the Nuremberg Code (1947). All following documents confirmed that the informed consent is mandatory in human subject research. However, t...

Patient autonomy in the age of consumer-driven health care: informed consent and informed choice.