A new Virginia law governing collaborations between nurse practitioners and doctors leaves unresolved key legal issues in team-based care, including those pertaining to medical malpractice and liability and anticompetitive practices.
The use of coded patient data for reimbursement purposes can tempt clinicians to exaggerate the severity of the patient's condition, skewing the accuracy of the data and interfering with clinical decision support and research.
Movements to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness and to make institutionalization more legally difficult have resulted in a lack of space and resources for the care of those with severe mental illness, and many have ended up in jails and prisons.
Registries of those considered dangerous focus wrongly on those with mental illness, who account for only 4 percent of violent acts committed in the United States.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The individual mandates and the optional Medicaid expansion will begin on January 1, 2014.
Those charged by the ACA health reform act to identify best clinical practices that are evidence-based and applicable across diverse populations can learn much from the experience of the Medicare-funded End Stage Renal Disease Program.