Personal Injury Law

What did my doctor just say?

By Steven M. Levin and John J. Perconti

Medical professionals have a tendency to speak in abbreviations. In such a busy, hectic setting such as an emergency room or a doctor?s office, abbreviations shorten time. However, some patients do not follow and are left in the dust. Here is a website where you can enter the abbreviation and then the search engine provides the definition.

Abbreviations can lead to medical malpractice when a handwritten abbreviation is misinterpreted as meaning something different than what the physician intended. In fact, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has issued a ?do-not-use? list because of their probability of misinterpretation, leading to dosing errors and serious medical malpractice.

For the website.

Full post as published by Illinois Medical Malpractice Blog on January 19, 2009 (boomark / email).