Bill designed to bolster medical error reporting moves through House Subcommittee

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health recently passed a bill designed to establish a database record for health care providers to provide information regarding medical errors to patient safety monitoring groups both at the state and private levels. Reporting the errors would be voluntary, however.

The legislation would call on Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) to maintain the database, and to statistically evaluate the input information. Of particular interest is that the bill would block the information from use in medical malpractice lawsuits.
   
The bill would also authorize money in fiscal years 2006 and 2007 to be used to help prevent medical errors.

Around the web

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CMS has more than doubled the CCTA payment rate from $175 to $357.13. The move, expected to have a significant impact on the utilization of cardiac CT, received immediate praise from imaging specialists.

The newly cleared offering, AutoChamber, was designed with opportunistic screening in mind. It can evaluate many different kinds of CT images, including those originally gathered to screen patients for lung cancer. 

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