blog | Lane Brown, LLC

Pinpointing whether or not your medical ailments are a result of Illinois medical malpractice can be difficult.

It may seem like the pain and complications you are experiencing are just a side effect of the original medical problems you were facing, or that the injuries were a risk that you unfortunately were victim to.

That is why the Chicago medical malpractice attorneys at Lane Brown want to discuss two commonly overlooked medical malpractice injuries, in order to help readers better recognize them and hopefully prevent them from happening.

Commonly overlooked medical malpractice injuries include:

Problems with anesthesia. If an anesthesiologist does not correctly administer the anesthetics according to a patient’s height, weight, age, and allergies, there can be devastating consequences. In addition to the patient potentially waking up during the middle of the surgery or procedure and feeling excruciating pain, there is also the risk that the patient could be given too much anesthesia and pass away.
Surgical mistakes. These mistakes include everything from operating on the wrong limb to accidentally cutting an artery. There have also been serious cases that involved surgical teams mistakenly leaving behind foreign objects, like gauze or tools, inside the body before stitching up the surgical site. This can cause a serious infection, sometimes leading to death.

The reputable attorneys at Lane Brown would be happy to sit down with you and your family—for free—to confidentially discuss your situation if you feel that you are a victim of Illinois medical malpractice. Simply call 312-332-1400, or fill out the online form and an attorney will get back with you shortly. Call or click today.

Before You Speak With an Insurance Adjuster in Illinois…

Shortly after a person is injured in a Chicago motor vehicle accident, it is very common for the at-fault party’s insurance company to contact the victim in order to gather information.

The adjuster will most likely ask to confirm the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of all victims. The adjuster will also need to know the vehicles’ makes and models, where the accident occurred, and what type of injuries were sustained.

Chances are the adjuster will want the victim to provide the answers to these questions during a recorded call. It is very important to not allow the call to be recorded unless you have first spoken with an attorney.

The adjuster will probably also tell the victim that in order for the medical bills to be paid, the insurance company must order all of the corresponding records that relate to the accident. For these records to be ordered, a medical authorization must be signed, giving the insurance company permission to contact the doctor or hospital where those records are housed. While this may seem logical, and necessary in order for the bills to be paid, it is actually an extremely bad idea to sign a medical authorization provided by the insurance company.

This is because the insurance company will take the opportunity to use that release to order medical records that have nothing to do with the accident itself. Instead, they will order your complete medical chart, in hopes of finding something that is private in nature and potentially detrimental to the case.

While it is true that the records do in fact need to be ordered, make sure that it is done by an attorney you trust, and who has your best interests in mind.

Before you speak with any insurance adjusters, talk with one of the experienced and trusted attorneys at Lane Brown (888-529-9377). We offer a free consultation to discuss your case. Call today and learn how we can get you the compensation you deserve.

Stroke victims, their families and attorneys should be aware that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a common disorder found after stroke or major traumas, and may play a significant role in impeding recovery. Frequently a consequence of acute life-threatening events, including acute coronary syndrome (ACS), cancer, and stroke, PTSD is estimated to affect up to 18% of stroke survivors. PTSD has been shown to impair stoke victims’ reliable adherence to medication regimens, according to new research.

Investigators at Columbia University Medical Center in New York found that 65% of stroke survivors with PTSD failed to adhere to treatment vs 33% of their counterparts without PTSD. They also found that concerns about medications were a primary barrier to treatment adherence.
Stroke survivors should be assessed for concerns about medications and PTSD symptoms, so that interventions may be introduced as early as possible to get patients back on track to avoid future stroke events. The study was published online on January 7th in the British Journal of Health Psychology.

In survivors of strokes and transient ischaemic attacks…adherence to risk-reducing medications, including antiplatelet agents, antihypertensive agents, and statins, is especially important for preventing subsequent strokes.

When dealing with the pain and aftermath of a serious Chicago personal injury claim, the last thing you want to do is take photos of the accident scene. Unfortunately, those photos could end up being the difference between winning and losing your case.

Taking photos is just one part of the extremely important task of documenting everything after any type of personal injury.

Other forms of documentation are critically important to your case:

Medical records and bills relating to your injuries.
Any correspondence, written or recorded, between you and insurance companies, medical personnel, and emergency responders (police, firefighters, etc.).
Police report from the scene of the accident.
Eyewitness accounts, usually in writing, of the accident.

Make sure to keep all this information in one place, so that it is readily available when it comes time to speak with your attorney.

If you are having trouble gathering this information on your own, like photographs of the accident scene or pictures of the injuries sustained to your body, enlisting the help of an experienced Chicago personal injury lawyer is the best route to go. That is what they are here for – to handle as much of the claim as possible, so that you can focus on regaining your health.

Let the compassionate and trusted lawyers at Lane Brown, LLC, be the ones to help you through this daunting process. Simply call 312-332-1400, or fill out the online form. We offer a free consultation to discuss your case.

Veterans and Medicare beneficiaries can now enjoy new access to their own medical information and other data. In August, President Obama announced the creation of the “Blue Button”—a web-based feature through which patients may easily download their health information and share it with health care providers, caregivers, and others they trust. Since then, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have beta-tested their respective systems—with great success. The Blue Button was formally launched today.

Veterans should log onto My HealtheVet at www.myhealth.va.gov and click the Blue Button can save or print information from their own health records. Medicare beneficiaries who are registered users of www.mymedicare.gov can log onto a secure site where they can save or print their Medicare claims and self-entered personal information with the Blue Button there. Data from of each site can be used to create portable medical histories that will facilitate dialog with Veterans’ and beneficiaries’ health care providers, caregivers, and other trusted individuals or entities.

The Blue Button option should help Veterans and Medicare beneficiaries save their information on individual computers and portable storage devices or print that information in hard copy. Having this ready access to personal health information from Medicare claims can help beneficiaries understand their medical history and work more easily and effectively with providers, as well as provide valuable assistance to their attorneys. The Blue Button feature will allow Medicare beneficiaries to view their claims and self-entered information—and be able to export that data onto their own computer. The information is downloaded as an “ASCII text file,” the easiest and simplest electronic text format. The files are easy to read by the individual, and helps organize a lot of information.

The My HealtheVet personal health record includes self-entered health data (including blood pressure, weight, and heart rate), emergency contact information, test results, family health history, military health history, and other health-related information. The ASCII text file that Veterans can download will include this information. As additional personal health information becomes available to VA patients through the My HealtheVet personal health record, this will also be added to the VA Blue Button download. In pre-launch testings, the VA’s Blue Button system has generated an overwhelmingly positive response, and many veterans have already used it to access their records.

For a long time, registered users of MyMedicare.gov have had the ability to view their Medicare claims information add their personal and health information, such as emergency contact information, names of pharmacies and providers, self-reported allergies, medical conditions, and prescription drugs. Now, with the Blue Button, CMS is making it convenient and safe for them to download and share this information in an easy-to-read and portable format. For people who are involved in personal injury or medical malpractice claims, the slow-moving administration of Medicare agencies has delayed their recoveries of settlement funds for months, and oftentimes, for more than a year!

The VA and CMS both stress the importance to users of protecting the electronic information on their personal computers with appropriate security measures. Once individuals download their data, they will need to ensure its safety—for example, by encryption or password protection.

The VA and CMS issued a challenge to software developers to develop apps to make the Blue Button even easier and more useful. The winner of that challenge is Adobe’s Blue Button Health Assistant. This new “app” provides a comfortable and familiar user layout and eases the linkage of consumer information—including immunizations, allergies, medications, family health history, lab test results, and military service histories—among patients, providers, and caregivers using My HealtheVet, or claims data for those using the CMS Button.

Soon, Blue Button users may be able to augment the downloaded information that is housed on their computers—or that they transferred to a commercial personal health record or other health application—through automated connections to, and downloads from, major pharmacies including Walgreens and CVS; lab systems such as Quest and LabCorp; and an increasing number of inpatient and outpatient electronic medical records systems.

The FDA has issued a “Warning Letter”, dated January 10, 2013, to St. Jude Medical, a company that manufactures many medical devices used throughout the world, including implantable cardiac devices. In the letter, St, Jude was advised that, during a 2012 inspection of St. Jude’s Sylmar, California facility, FDA investigators determined that St. Jude manufactured implantable cardiac leads which were “adulterated” under federal law, in that the methods used in, or the facilities or controls used for, their manufacture, packing, storage, or installation are not in conformity with the current good manufacturing practice requirements of the Quality System regulation found at Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Part 820. While St. Jude has responded to some of the concerns addressed by the investigators,the FDA has concluded that the responses were inadequate.

The FDA has asked St. Jude to provide written notice within fifteen business days from the date they received the warning letter of the specific steps St. Judey has taken to correct the noted violations, as well as an explanation of how the firm plans to prevent these violations, or similar violations, from occurring again. They asked that St. Jude include documentation of the corrections and/or corrective actions (including any systemic corrective actions) that the firm has taken. If St. Jude’s planned corrections and/or corrective actions will occur over time, they are to include a timetable for implementation of those activities. If corrections and/or corrective actions cannot be completed within fifteen business days, St. Jude was asked to state the reason for the delay and the time within which these activities will be completed. Finally, the warning letter notes that St. Jude’s “response should be comprehensive and address all violations included in this Warning Letter.” We’ll see…but it looks like the FDA is finally running out of patience with St. Jude.