How litigation improves quality of care
PressConnects.com had a great article affirming the need for litigation; the article explains how a lawsuit initiated a change in policy and quality of care at several nursing homes. The change was a result of the Rockfrod Incident.
Ortiz, bed-ridden from dementia, was a patient at a Rochester nursing home. His son, Felix Ortiz, suspected that his father was being neglected.
"I would walk into the nursing home and some of the workers were just sitting around, looking at their Avon books and not going into patients' rooms," Felix Ortiz said. "In my dad's room, it smelled like feces and urine. When you've been around your loved one all your life, you can tell what he's thinking, and I could see in his eyes that something wasn't right. There was a sadness."
In the spring of 2005, Ortiz's family authorized the state Attorney General's Office to install a hidden surveillance camera in his room. It documented that Ortiz wasn't being turned every two hours to prevent pressure sores, wasn't being given proper hydration, and was left lying for hours in his own waste while caregivers made bogus notations on his chart that proper care was being provided. An investigation showed that supervision at the nursing home was so lax that employees who were supposed to be delivering care in some cases were sleeping, smoking, watching movies and leaving the nursing home for personal reasons while on the clock.
Eventually, 14 employees were convicted of criminal charges for falsely attesting that they had provided care to Ortiz, who died in June 2006. But his case now has a far-reaching effect on other nursing home patients across New York.
Under the settlement of a civil lawsuit brought by the Attorney General's Office against the company that formerly owned the nursing home, nine other nursing homes from Buffalo to the Bronx owned by the same company will install electronic point-of-care devices that require employees to document care as it's delivered, generating a central computer record to verify the care.
Point-of-care technology uses electronic devices to allow health-care facilities to record services, such as the dispensing of medication or the turning of bed-ridden patients, in real time. The information is used to create electronic medical records not only for patients' medical charts, but to help generate billing information for medical insurance. The point-of-care systems "will help insure that documented, consistent, high-quality care is given to each resident and allow us to capture care data in nearly real time and alert supervisors when a step is missed," the company said in a statement. "Point of care is essential to the preparation and maintenance of electronic medical records, which will be an important step in delivering care across the entire spectrum of care requirements from doctor visits to nursing homes to critical-care facilities." "Our loved ones who reside in such facilities deserve to receive the best care possible," Cuomo said in a statement. "This settlement helps revolutionize these homes to prevent patient abuse and neglect."
All nursing homes should be required to install electronic point-of-care devices in every patient's room. The new system will allow caregivers to record resident information in their rooms instead of having to walk back to their station, thus saving time. The less time they spend with paperwork, the more time caregivers can spend with patients, Many hospitals and some nursing homes currently use the technology.
Felix Ortiz said the settlement is a tribute to his father, a retired factory worker and laborer who was known to his family for his physical strength. "He would be proud," he said. "To be part of a whole new revolution, saving lives and helping people -- that's the ultimate right there."
