A few weeks ago the announcements came down, CMS had ‘deemed’ three organizations to accredit the new classification of Advanced Imaging in order to be eligible for Medicare & Medicaid reimbursement: the American College of Radiology (ACR), the Intersocietal Commission, and the Joint Commission (TJC).
The other two have had modality-specific accreditation programs for years, so what was the TJC going to do? Well, they’ve released their accreditation criteria, and one of the most wonderful surprises is that MRI safety is more prominent than it is in either of the other two ‘imaging’ accrediting bodies!
And what’s even more alarming is that 20% of those implant patients that get MRIs experience some sort of device malfunction afterward! And yet, the dangers of imaging these patients are not well known by the doctors who prescribe these imaging studies.
It is the stuff of fabled oral-histories, often dismissed as MRI urban-legend. The patient is wheeled into the MRI room on a gurney that goes flying toward the scanner. “How on Earth could these accidents happen when we know about these risks,” the skeptics question? Almost never does more than a single fragment of information surface about these sorts of accidents and, without verification, nearly all accounts can be erroneously written-off as fiction. Or, that was until enough pieces fell into place to conclusively document a recent episode… Click Here To Read More About MRI Gurney Accidents…
Throughout 2009, we saw tantalizing glimpses of potential MRI safety improvements, which repeatedly escaped becoming real. Here are my ‘Top 3′ near-miss opportunities of 2009 to substantially reshape MR safety…
This post attempts to draw-together two recent threads from here on the MRI Metal Detector blog. First, there was a long-running question about the FDA and their online-accessible database of medical device accidents which, for months, appeared to be malfunctioning, and recently was repaired. Second, there was my post in which I identified 5 MRI ‘Never Events’ which, if industry standard procedures are followed, should never occur.
“Tweet, tweet” is usually all I hear from little birdies… but one little bird that flew past my office recently had a surprisingly large vocabulary and told me of new requirements that will be introduced in the forthcoming 2010 update to the ‘Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities’ (commonly referred to as ‘Guidelines’).
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Guidelines, they are the design requirements that are cited by the Joint Commission and, at last count, 42 of the 50 U.S. State Departments of Health. Technically, they aren’t a building code, but the function in almost the exact same way. For the first time, the Guidelines are going to have specific MRI suite design requirements for patient safety.
As if you needed a personal invitation from me, here it is nonetheless. Please join me (and a several thousand of your colleagues) at the American Hot Rod Association [ahem] American Healthcare Radiology Administrators annual meeting in August. And though it may not really be my place to invite you to the conference, I do want to extend to you a personal invitation to 2½ special events that will happen during that week.
When I was eight, these words struck fear in my heart. It didn’t matter how small the infraction I committed was (or if there even was an infraction to begin with), I would beg the other kid to not ‘tell’ whoever it was that they were planning to tell. It may have been their kindly grandmother that they planned on telling, but in my mind it was always some 7-foot troll who would have undoubtedly come outside and chewed me to bits.
It took a while, but slowly I realized that tellin‘ and getting in trouble were two, very different things. This is a lesson that we in the MRI community would do well to learn regarding accidents.
Last year, the United States Supreme Court decided that medical device manufacturers that had gone through the trial-by-fire of a FDA pre-market review are immune from civil action in the state courts for product liability (Riegel v. Medtronic). Just a few weeks ago, the Court threw what many considered to be a major curve-ball when they decided that comparable protections do NOT apply to pharmaceutical manufacturers (Levine v. Wyeth). What does this suggest to MRI providers (Technologists, Radiologists and Administrators)?
