This activity is intended for healthcare providers delivering care to women and their families.
After completing this activity, the participant should be better able to:
1. Recall that laws and statutes relating to the time for claims of medical malpractice may vary from state to state
2. List the key time points during cancer care, where a missed opportunity for diagnosis may occur
Estimated time to complete activity: 0.25 hours
Susan J. Gross, MD, FRCSC, FACOG, FACMG
President and CEO, The ObG Project
Postgraduate Institute for Medicine (PIM) requires instructors, planners, managers and other individuals who are in a position to control the content of this activity to disclose any real or apparent conflict of interest (COI) they may have as related to the content of this activity. All identified COI are thoroughly vetted and resolved according to PIM policy. PIM is committed to providing its learners with high quality CME activities and related materials that promote improvements or quality in healthcare and not a specific proprietary business interest of a commercial interest.
Faculty: Susan J. Gross, MD, receives consulting fees from Genoox, Inc., and has financial interest in The ObG Project, Inc.
Planners and Managers: The PIM planners and managers, Trace Hutchison, PharmD, Samantha Mattiucci, PharmD, CHCP, Judi Smelker-Mitchek, MBA, MSN, RN, and Jan Schultz, MSN, RN, CHCP have nothing to disclose.
Fees for participating and receiving CME credit for this activity are as posted on The ObG Project website. During the period from March 4 2018 through March 3 2020, participants must read the learning objectives and faculty disclosures and study the educational activity.
If you wish to receive acknowledgment for completing this activity, please complete the post-test and evaluation. Upon registering and successfully completing the post-test with a score of 100% and the activity evaluation, your certificate will be made available immediately.
For Pharmacists: Upon successfully completing the post-test with a score of 100% and the activity evaluation form, transcript information will be sent to the NABP CPE Monitor Service within 4 weeks.
In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by the Postgraduate Institute for Medicine and The ObG Project. Postgraduate Institute for Medicine is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.
Postgraduate Institute for Medicine designates this enduring material for a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
The maximum number of hours awarded for this Continuing Nursing Education activity is 0.2 contact hours.
On January 31, 2018, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced that he and the state legislature had come to terms on a bill covering a misdiagnosis of cancer. The bill, which became law, allows for a 2 1/2-year window for a patient to bring malpractice cases involving a cancer misdiagnosis. The law stipulates that the negligence cannot have occurred more than seven years prior to a suit being filed. Previously, the clock for medical malpractice involving cancer misdiagnosis started when the misdiagnosis occurred— meaning patients were not able to bring claims if they discovered a potential medical error after the window closed. Included in the law is a provision for people whose statute of limitations ran out in the last 10 months to get an additional six-month window to sue.
There are multiple opportunities to address ‘missed opportunities’ when it comes to cancer diagnoses and treatment. As Lyratzopoulos and colleagues (British Journal of Cancer, 2015) note, while not all such ‘missed opportunities’ will result in lesser outcomes for patients, all preventable delays should be avoided wherever possible. The authors point to 3 crucial time points where ‘missed opportunities’ may occur:
There are often multiple reasons for failure to make a cancer diagnosis which can be related to patient, provider and system factors and can happen at any of the above time points. Lyratzopoulos et al. note that a multi-disciplinary approach is required to have an effect on missed diagnoses:
As is the case for safety interventions in general, identification of instances where missed opportunities have occurred is a pre-requisite for motivating and guiding organisational learning and improvement efforts and service redesign.
Evaluating the Medical Malpractice System and Options for Reform.
Who is Lavern? (NY Daily News, January 29, 2018)
Take a post-test and get CME credits
OBG Project CME requires a modern web browser (Internet Explorer 10+, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge). Certain educational activities may require additional software to view multimedia, presentation, or printable versions of their content. These activities will be marked as such and will provide links to the required software. That software may be: Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft PowerPoint, Windows Media Player, or Real Networks Real One Player.
This educational activity may contain discussion of published and/or investigational uses of agents that are not indicated by the FDA. The planners of this activity do not recommend the use of any agent outside of the labeled indications.
The opinions expressed in the educational activity are those of the faculty and do not necessarily represent the views of the planners. Please refer to the official prescribing information for each product for discussion of approved indications, contraindications, and warnings.
Participants have an implied responsibility to use the newly acquired information to enhance patient outcomes and their own professional development. The information
presented in this activity is not meant to serve as a guideline for patient management. Any procedures, medications, or other courses of diagnosis or treatment discussed or suggested in this activity should not be used by clinicians without evaluation of their patient’s conditions and possible contraindications and/or dangers in use, review of any applicable manufacturer’s product information, and comparison with recommendations of other authorities.
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