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Volume 16 • Issue 10 • $5.00 April 2020
THE REGION’S MONTHLY NEWSPAPER FOR HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS & PHYSICIANS

Malpractice Insurance

EXPERT ADVICE

Individual APP Policies

Can Result in Costly Surprises

BY VANESSA ORR

It is very common in most medical practices to have
advanced practice providers (APP) such as physician
Dr. Steven G. Ullmann assistants, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, surgical
assistants and more listed on the practice’s malpractice
insurance. Through this policy, they may either share in
An Honest the limit of liability or have a separate limit of their own,
but some APPs may feel that this is not enough - especial-
ly if they’re moonlighting or don’t feel safe with a prac- Dr. Thomas Macaluso
Appraisal – tice’s lower limits.
“A hot topic at the moment is that qualified nurse prac- Matt Gracey Thoughtful,
March 20, titioners will now be able to independently operate pri-
mary care practices without an attending doctor’s supervi-
sion under a bill just passed by the legislature,” said Matt Gracey, medical malprac- Careful Planning
2020 tice insurance specialist at Danna-Gracey, the largest independent medical malprac- and Strategies
tice insurance agency in Florida.
Continued on page 6
Has Memorial
BY STEVEN G. ULLMANN, PHD
My Coworker’s Husband
Well, who would have thought …? I Healthcare
have been doing an in-class team exer-
cise in my Health Care Executive MBA Needed a Kidney Transplant, System Prepared
course for some twenty years, assigning
teams as the C-Suite of a healthcare sys- So I Volunteered Mine
tem with an impending pandemic. The for Influx of
exercise involves reflecting upon the
need for preparation, complications that COVID-19
may occur, and recovery given such a sit-
uation. And now, unfortunately, here it Patients
is. I assure you I/we will never have to
look prospectively at this type of exercise
ever again. BY DANIEL CASCIATO
There are so many elements associated
with this situation from a health care sys- To prepare for COVID-19 patients,
tem perspective, certainly more elements Memorial Healthcare System made sig-
than I can bring up in the allotted space. nificant changes to its operations, such
However, let me begin (and it is fortu- as deploying an external triage, allowing
nate that some of these elements have non-essential employees to work from
been thought through and implemented home, setting up a drive-thru testing
already). site, as well as limiting visitors.
First, our patients … the ramped-up According to Dr. Thomas Macaluso,
ability to determine whether patients are Memorial's Chief Quality and Safety
exhibiting signs of the virus and appro- VITAS Admissions Nurse Claudine Raymond (far right) and other members of the VITAS Patient Officer, each of the hospitals
priately triaging and quarantining. Many team spend time with colleague Amy Guerette (in hospital bed). have added temporary structures outside
facilities have their protocols in place. of the main emergency room for more
But even here we begin to see complica- BY AMY GUERETTE, RN screening.
tions. Viral symptoms looking so much “We added triage tents outside of the
like the common flu, and with delays in Everything changed in the summer of 2019 when I had a candid conversation with main emergency room so patients with
testing and results, we may be mixing Claudine Raymond, my colleague at VITAS® Healthcare. One day in the cafeteria of fever or other signs of a respiratory
those with viral symptoms similar to the hospital where we both work as hospice admission nurses, she shared about her infection can be triaged through the
Corona but not afflicted with those who husband’s kidney disease, his deteriorating health and the stress it was causing on tents,” he says. “All other patients with
have true Corona, thereby infecting oth- the entire family, including their three children, ages 2-14. At a young age of 39, her other types of medical emergencies that
ers in the quarantined areas. With husband, Junior Raymond, was facing dialysis three times a week and had been told are not virus-related can present through
Continued on page 12 Continued on page 9 Continued on page 15