COVER STORY
Turn Off Those Mobile Devices
How to manage the risks and rules related to personal electronic devices BY SAHELY MUKERJI
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n June, a Virginia patient was awarded $500,000 in a lawsuit he filed against his anesthesiologist after recording his colonoscopy on his smart phone’s audio recorder. The patient says that he turned the recorder on so he could tape the instructions his doctor would give him after the procedure. When he played the recording later, he found that the anes- thesiologist repeatedly mocked and insulted him while he was sedated dur- ing the procedure and filed suit. About six months ago at an ASC
in central Arkansas, a patient tried to bring an iPad that was set to record into an operating room, says Pam Hooper, administrator of the ASC involved and owner of its management company, Consultants In Healthcare. When asked to turn the device over to staff, the patient resisted. “When we told the physician about the incident following surgery, he stated that if he
16 ASC FOCUS OCTOBER 2015
If I am a surveyor at an organization that does not have a written cell phone policy, I would consultatively encourage them to have one and develop a process to enforce that policy.”
— Raymond Grundman, CASC Ambulatory Accreditation Operations at the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care
had known that earlier, he would have considered canceling the procedure,” Hooper says.
“This is a rapidly moving topic,” says Debra Stinchcomb, RN, CASC, consul-
tant at Progressive Surgical Solutions LLC based in Powley, California. “We actually discussed this last month at our Arkansas state association meeting.”
The Problem, the Solution “Patients have the right to be treated with dignity and respect, but we have to be aware of these kinds of incidents and be more cognizant of these devices and more pro-active,” says Raymond Grundman, CASC, vice president and general manager of Ambulatory Accreditation Operations at the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care in Skokie, Illinois. “The Virginia lawsuit needs to be a wake-up call for all ASCs. This is a problem looming large. If this happened once, it could happen to any organization, at any time. So we need to sit down and start a conversation about how to solve this. The situation in Virginia raises important questions about how we protect patient rights with respect to privacy.”
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