New research underscores the need, effectiveness of formalizing sign-out and discharge summary processes.

Boston attorney Ted Mahoney tells obstetricians that a few notes about evaluating the pelvis before and during labor, and describing shoulder dystocia maneuvers will improve their chances if a lawsuit results from Erb's Palsy.

Part 3 of an address by best-selling author and Harvard Professor of Medicine Jerome Groopman to a patient safety symposium in Cambridge about the cognitive processes that lead physicians to make an incorrect diagnosis. Part 1 reviewed the ways physicians seek and process information on their way to making correct and incorrect diagnoses. Part 2 involved how how thinking errors occur. Part 3 looks at how to apply this knowledge to improving diagnoses in medical practice.

Best-selling author and Harvard Professor of Medicine Jerome Groopman speaks to a patient safety symposium in Cambridge about the cognitive processes that lead physicians to make an incorrect diagnosis. Part 1 reviewed the ways physicians seek and process information on their way to making correct and incorrect diagnoses. Part 3 will look at how to apply this knowledge to improving diagnoses in medical practice.

Best-selling author and Harvard Professor of Medicine Jerome Groopman speaks to a patient safety symposium in Cambridge about the ways physicians seek and process information on their way to making correct and incorrect diagnoses. Subsequent segments Part II and Part III will review how thinking errors occur, and how to apply this knowledge to improving diagnoses in medical practice.

When they became patients, these five physicians found that communication, attention to detail, and willingness to learn from error were all missing sometimes.

Even the best care in medicine can be undermined when responsibility for the patient is transferred from one provider to the next. Hand-offs—both within the hospital and upon discharge—are the subject of increasing attention by malpractice insurers and patient safety researchers.

The idea is how do you take that big wedge of paper and divide it to the appropriate provider and then how do you stratify what is urgent and what is not urgent?

A technique for using senior hospital executives to improve patient safety is proving so successful that one hospital in Boston is now applying it to ambulatory sites.

When a patient has an adverse medical event, it may or may not be the result of a medical error. Legal Editor Frank Reardon says that what you do after an adverse outcome has a lot to do with whether a patient wants to sue someone.