Administrative Compensation for Medical Injuries: Lessons From Three Foreign Systems

Examines "no-fault" systems in New Zealand, Sweden, and Denmark, in which patients injured by medical negligence can file for compensation through governmental or private adjudicating organizations. Considers lessons for U.S. medical malpractice reform

Rationalizing Noneconomic Damages: A Health-Utilities Approach

Studdert et al examine why making compensation of noneconomic damages in personal-injury litigation more rational and predictable is socially valuable. Noneconomic-damages schedules as an alternative to caps are discussed, several potential approaches to construction of schedules are reviewed, and the use of a health-utilities approach as the most promising model is argued. An empirical analysis that combines health-utilities data created in a previous study with original empirical work is used to demonstrate how key steps in construction of a health-utilities-based schedule for noneconomic damages might proceed

STATEFUL METHOD FOR ACCESS POINT DISCOVERY OF WIRELESS LOCAL AREA NETWORK CONTROLLER

Access points (APs) for a wireless local area network (WLAN) can discover a wireless LAN controller (WLC) address (in order to establish a management session with the WLC) through a variety of mechanisms, such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) option 43 mechanisms, Domain Name System (DNS) server mechanisms, and Layer 2 (L2) broadcast discovery mechanisms. The DHCP discovery mechanism is the most commonly used mechanism for WLC discovery but is a laborious and manual task that may be prone to errors. Techniques proposed herein provide an easy to use, stateful, and reliable mechanism through which an AP can discover a WLC by leveraging a DHCP relay agent that can forward DHCP packets between clients and servers. The techniques involve various functionalities including, but not limited to, a stateful process that can be used to measure reachability and latency to each configured WLC Internet Protocol (IP) address, the creation of an updated priority list of WLC IP addresses based on network latency, and the inline insertion of the list of WLC IP addresses in the DHCP exchange between a server and AP

A Curricular Reform Viewed Through Bolman and Deal’s Organizational Frames

Professions exist to serve the needs of society, communities and, in the case of the dental profession, patients. Academic dental institutions strive to help meet these needs by educating and developing future practitioners, educators, researchers, and citizen leaders who serve the community and shape the changing environment in which they practice and provide care. The American Dental Association Commission on Change and Innovation affirms, “If dental educators are to meet these purposes, change and innovation in dental education must be responsive to evolving societal needs, practice patterns, scientific developments, and economic conditions”(Haden, et al., 2006). Guiding any institution through such authentic reform requires a number of strategies. Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal suggest four organizational constructs, or frames, through which to view a complex organization: Structural, Human Resource, Political and Symbolic (Bolman and Deal, 1997).“Like maps, frames are both windows on a territory and tools for navigation” (Bolman and Deal, 1997). This reflective case study examines a major curricular reform initiative in a North American school of dentistry through Bolman and Deal’s organizational frames

Intra-oral anatomy training device

Disclosed herein are typodont models and dental mannequins that provide a highly accurate representation of the human or non-human animal oral anatomy. The model embodiments disclosed herein provide life-like materials and various features of the oral cavity not found in typical typodont models. Additionally, the typodont models disclosed herein simulate many challenging conditions that arise in dental procedures when performed on live subjects such as, for example, clouding of instruments including mirrors used to view the interior portion of the oral cavity, oral fluid interfering with the work area, and other real-life interferences and complications. The ability to mimic the oral cavity with as much accuracy as possible is beneficial to the dental field for both practitioners as well as patients

Human factors and ergonomics in patient safety curriculum

The importance of teaching human factors and ergonomics (HFE) and patient safety is registered in two compelling facts: 1) the numbers of physicians who train in VA hospitals and 2) in the need for hospitals to function as highly reliable organizations. In the United States, more than half of the physicians‐in‐training do at least part of their medical school and residency training at veterans' health care facilities. Health care currently does not measure up to other high‐reliability organizations. By providing a HFE‐based patient safety curriculum, we hope to improve patient safety at the frontlines. We see the lasting benefit as residency programs that produce physicians who are competent, patient safety problem solvers throughout their careers who will assist health care organizations to become highly reliable. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89469/1/20282_ftp.pd

Does Medical Malpractice Law Improve Health Care Quality?

Despite the fundamental role of deterrence in justifying a system of medical malpractice law, surprisingly little evidence has been put forth to date bearing on the relationship between medical liability forces on the one hand and medical errors and health care quality on the other. In this paper, we estimate this relationship using clinically validated measures of health care treatment quality constructed using data from the 1979 to 2005 National Hospital Discharge Surveys and the 1987 to 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System records. Drawing upon traditional, remedy-centric tort reforms — e.g., damage caps — we estimate that the current liability system plays at most a modest role in inducing higher levels of health care quality. We contend that this limited independent role for medical liability may be a reflection upon the structural nature of the present system of liability rules, which largely hold physicians to standards determined according to industry customs. We find evidence suggesting, however, that physician practices may respond more significantly upon a substantive alteration of this system altogether — i.e., upon a change in the clinical standards to which physicians are held in the first instance. The literature to date has largely failed to appreciate the substantive nature of liability rules and may thus be drawing limited inferences based solely on our experiences to date with damage-caps and related reforms

A Curricular reform viewed through Bolman and Deal’s organizational frames

Professions exist to serve the needs of society, communities and, in the case of the dental profession, patients.  Academic dental institutions strive to help meet these needs by educating and developing future practitioners, educators, researchers, and citizen leaders who serve the community and shape the changing environment in which they practice and provide care. The American Dental Association Commission on Change and Innovation affirms, “If dental educators are to meet these purposes, change and innovation in dental education must be responsive to evolving societal needs, practice patterns, scientific developments, and economic conditions”(Haden, et al., 2006). Guiding any institution through such authentic reform requires a number of strategies. Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal suggest four organizational constructs, or frames, through which to view a complex organization:  Structural, Human Resource, Political and Symbolic (Bolman and Deal, 1997).“Like maps, frames are both windows on a territory and tools for navigation” (Bolman and Deal, 1997). This reflective case study examines a major curricular reform initiative in a North American school of dentistry through Bolman and Deal’s organizational frames

Disclosure, Apology, and Offer Programs: Stakeholders’ Views of Barriers to and Strategies for Broad Implementation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94445/1/j.1468-0009.2012.00679.x.pd