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Health Law and Policy

Boston University School of Law

Faculty Scholarship

Series

2001

Patient safety

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Medical Error Reporting: Professional Tensions Between Confidentiality & Liability, Wendy K. Mariner, Frances H. Miller Nov 2001

Medical Error Reporting: Professional Tensions Between Confidentiality & Liability, Wendy K. Mariner, Frances H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

Improving patient safety depends on a sophisticated understanding of what can jeopardize it. Reports of adverse patient events and "near misses" constitute valuable information that can foster that understanding. Knowing what has gone wrong in the past facilitates the search for systems improvements, which can prevent recurrence. Unfortunately, providers have been generally unenthusiastic about reporting medical error, whether from a sense of shame, from a fear of liability and institutional sanctions, or from anxiety about reputation and relationships with peers. This Issue Brief lays out the factors that may affect reporting, and explores the limited evidence about whether providers' confidentiality …


Making Clinical Trials Safer For Human Subjects, Michael S. Baram Jan 2001

Making Clinical Trials Safer For Human Subjects, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical trials, in which new biotech and other medical products are tested on human subjects, provide much of the data used by the FDA to determine whether the products are suitable for routine use in health care. Thus, the trials are of obvious importance to medical progress and improvement of public health, and to those who have career and financial interests at stake. But clinical trials are also important to the human subjects involved because the products being tested on them may remedy their illnesses, but may also pose risks since the products have usually not been previously tested on …