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A data breach doesn’t need to be criminal or intentional to be reportable. When a storage device is small, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the device was lost, misplaced or stolen. However, even if a flash drive is presumably lost, a breach analysis must still be conducted and potentially affected patients must be notified if there is a probability of data compromise.

According to the defense expert in the following case, patients who can’t or won’t engage in alternative treatments for their pain should not be prescribed pain medications as a matter of course. Consider how the overdose in the following case could have been prevented if the internist had followed the CDC opioid prescribing guidelines.

Concurrent use of opioid pain medications, benzodiazepines, antihistamines, antipsychotics, antianxiety agents, or other CNS depressants increases a patient’s risk for overdose.¹

In the U.S., there is broad ethical consensus supporting disclosure of known medical errors, but even so, the physician who must acknowledge a mistake faces a daunting situation. Disclosing medical errors is the theme of this physician-patient interaction resulting in a medical liability lawsuit.

In this interaction, the involved physicians avoided disclosing important information to the patient during the informed consent process. An informed consent exchange that is not truthful and complete violates standards of medical ethics.