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This interaction involves a situation in which a physician allowed a compromise of professional boundaries in several ways. He acquiesced to a patient’s inappropriate requests for narcotics, and he entered into a romantic relationship with the patient. In the end, the physician paid a great price for his actions.

In this interaction, a patient rejected a particular recommendation from his physician. Although the patient continued to see the physician for other matters, he declined a referral to a urologist. Thus, this case explores ethical ideas associated with a patient’s refusal of treatment.

In this physician-patient interaction, the patient’s insistence that she be treated as an outpatient caused an ethical conflict with her physician, who thought she would receive better care by being admitted to the hospital. This case illustrates a common medical ethics question: How should a difference between a patient’s request and a physician’s beliefs about best care be resolved?

NORCAL’s risk management specialists were asked to provide EHR liability risk issues they were seeing in the field. In addition to the issues covered in the EHR case studies presented in the March 2014 issue of Claims Rx, their list included:

Clinicians and staff will find ways to work around aspects of an EHR system that are frustrating, time-consuming or inflexible. As the following case indicates, workarounds can generate errors, undermine patient safety and result in lawsuits.