HCM337-0704B-01 Current Legal, Ethical, and Regulatory Issues in H - Essay - 2

HCM337-0704B-01 Current Legal, Ethical, and Regulatory Issues in H - Phase 1 Discussion Board 3 - Essay Example Sometimes regulatory forces moved extremely fast and changes come before a hospital or health care facility can adjust to the changes. In 2002 St. Jude Medical had new heart device they wanted to bring to the market, but regulatory forces mandated that the device be tested on X number of patients before brining it to market. The company was originally unaware of the regulations regarding human trials, which their entrance into the market costing them million of dollars in revenues (McCartney, 2007). This is an example of the types of negative consequences of not complying with regulation which also includes other detrimental penalties such as fines, lawsuits and even complete shutdown of a medical facility. Ocean Health currently has two regulatory non-compliance issues which must be dealt with immediately. The first problem the health facility is facing is poor medical record documentation. The medical record is a key instrument that provides a medium to keep track of a patient’s current status and the treatment option administer to the patient. It also provides other information about the patient such as demographic information which valuable for medical investigation of diseases. In order to improve the documentation of medical records Ocean Health has to understand the magnitude of errors, the different types of medical record errors and the reason these errors are occurring (Cheapceus). The healthcare facility should proceed by taking actions to remedy the problem and find ways to prevent medical record documentation errors from occurring. Two aspects must be covered to deal with the problems: the human factor and the organizational operating factor. The human factor can be improved to minimized errors in the process by performing an assessment of all medical professionals that deal with medical record input and output to determine if they