The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is an act of the United States Congress, passed in 1986 as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). It requires hospital emergency departments that accept payments from Medicare to provide an appropriate medical screening examination (MSE) for anyone seeking treatment for a medical condition regardless of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay. Participating hospitals may not transfer or discharge patients needing emergency treatment except with the informed consent or stabilization of the patient or when the patient's condition requires transfer to a hospital better equipped to administer the treatment.
Informed consent is a principle in medical ethics, medical law, media studies, and other fields, that a person must have sufficient information and understanding before making decisions about accepting risk, such as their medical care. Pertinent information may include risks and benefits of treatments, alternative treatments, the patient's role in treatment, and their right to refuse treatment. In most systems, healthcare providers have a legal and ethical responsibility to ensure that a patient's consent is informed. This principle applies more broadly than healthcare intervention, for example to conduct research, to disclose a person's medical information, or to participate in high risk sporting and recreational activities.
St. Elizabeths Hospital is a psychiatric hospital in Southeast Washington, D.C. operated by the District of Columbia Department of Mental Health. The hospital opened in 1855 under the name Government Hospital for the Insane, the first federally operated psychiatric hospital in the United States.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a cabinet-level executive branch department of the U.S. federal government created to protect the health of the U.S. people and providing essential human services. Its motto is "Improving the health, safety, and well-being of America". Before the separate federal Department of Education was created in 1979, it was called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).
An emergency medical technician is a medical professional that provides emergency medical services. EMTs are most commonly found serving on ambulances and in fire departments in the US and Canada, as full-time and some part-time departments require their firefighters to at least be EMT certified.
Patient rights consist of enforceable duties that healthcare professionals and healthcare business persons owe to patients to provide them with certain services or benefits. When such services or benefits become rights instead of simply privileges, then a patient can expect to receive them and can expect the support of people who enforce organization policies or legal codes to intervene on the patient's behalf if the patient does not receive them. A patient's bill of rights is a list of guarantees for those receiving medical care. It may take the form of a law or a non-binding declaration. Typically a patient's bill of rights guarantees patients information, fair treatment, and autonomy over medical decisions, among other rights.
An emergency department (ED), also known as an accident and emergency department (A&E), emergency room (ER), emergency ward (EW) or casualty department, is a medical treatment facility specializing in emergency medicine, the acute care of patients who present without prior appointment; either by their own means or by that of an ambulance. The emergency department is usually found in a hospital or other primary care center.
Medical privacy, or health privacy, is the practice of maintaining the security and confidentiality of patient records. It involves both the conversational discretion of health care providers and the security of medical records. The terms can also refer to the physical privacy of patients from other patients and providers while in a medical facility, and to modesty in medical settings. Modern concerns include the degree of disclosure to insurance companies, employers, and other third parties. The advent of electronic medical records (EMR) and patient care management systems (PCMS) have raised new concerns about privacy, balanced with efforts to reduce duplication of services and medical errors.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is a United States Act of Congress enacted by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 21, 1996. It aimed to alter the transfer of healthcare information, stipulated the guidelines by which personally identifiable information maintained by the healthcare and healthcare insurance industries should be protected from fraud and theft, and addressed some limitations on healthcare insurance coverage. It generally prohibits healthcare providers and businesses called covered entities from disclosing protected information to anyone other than a patient and the patient's authorized representatives without their consent. The bill does not restrict patients from receiving information about themselves. Furthermore, it does not prohibit patients from voluntarily sharing their health information however they choose, nor does it require confidentiality where a patient discloses medical information to family members, friends or other individuals not employees of a covered entity.
The terms medical record, health record and medical chart are used somewhat interchangeably to describe the systematic documentation of a single patient's medical history and care across time within one particular health care provider's jurisdiction. A medical record includes a variety of types of "notes" entered over time by healthcare professionals, recording observations and administration of drugs and therapies, orders for the administration of drugs and therapies, test results, X-rays, reports, etc. The maintenance of complete and accurate medical records is a requirement of health care providers and is generally enforced as a licensing or certification prerequisite.
The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) of 1988 are United States federal regulatory standards that apply to all clinical laboratory testing performed on humans in the United States, except clinical trials and basic research.
Health information exchange (HIE) is the mobilization of health care information electronically across organizations within a region, community or hospital system. Participants in data exchange are called in the aggregate Health Information Networks (HIN). In practice, the term HIE may also refer to the health information organization (HIO) that facilitates the exchange. The goal of HIE is to facilitate access to and retrieval of clinical data to provide to public health authorities in analyses of the health of the population.
Conscience clauses are legal clauses attached to laws in some parts of the United States and other countries which permit pharmacists, physicians, and/or other providers of health care not to provide certain medical services for reasons of religion or conscience. It can also involve parents withholding consenting for particular treatments for their children.
HIV exceptionalism is the term given to the trend to treat HIV/AIDS in law and policy differently from other diseases, including other sexually transmitted, infectious, lethal diseases. The term first appeared in print in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991.
A Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC) is a person responsible for conducting clinical trials using good clinical practice (GCP) under the auspices of a Principal Investigator (PI).
The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) is a small office within the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), specifically the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health in the Office of the Secretary of DHHS, that deals with ethical oversights in clinical research conducted by the department, mostly through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The Utah State Hospital (USH) is a mental hospital located in eastern Provo, Utah. The current superintendent is Dallas Earnshaw.
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, abbreviated the HITECH Act, was enacted under Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Under the HITECH Act, the United States Department of Health and Human Services resolved to spend $25.9 billion to promote and expand the adoption of health information technology. The Washington Post reported the inclusion of "as much as $36.5 billion in spending to create a nationwide network of electronic health records." At the time it was enacted, it was considered "the most important piece of health care legislation to be passed in the last 20 to 30 years" and the "foundation for health care reform."
The 21st Century Cures Act is a United States law enacted by the 114th United States Congress in December 2016 and then signed into law on December 13, 2016. It authorized $6.3 billion in funding, mostly for the National Institutes of Health. The act was supported especially by large pharmaceutical manufacturers and was opposed especially by some consumer organizations.
My Health Record (MHR) is the national digital health record platform for Australia, and is managed by the Australian Digital Health Agency. It was originally established as the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR), a shared electronic health summary set up by the Australian government with implementation overseen by the National Electronic Health Transition Authority (NEHTA). The purpose of the MHR is to provide a secure electronic summary of people's medical history which will eventually include information such as current medications, adverse drug reactions, allergies and immunisation history in an easily accessible format. This MHR is stored in a network of connected systems with the ability to improve the sharing of information amongst health care providers to improve patient outcomes no matter where in Australia a patient presents for treatment. PCEHR was an opt-in system with a unique individual healthcare identifier (IHI) being assigned to participants and the option of masking and limiting information available for viewing controlled by the patient or a nominated representative; MHR uses an opt-out system.
