Free Continuing Medical Education for MIEC Members
As an added benefit to membership, MIEC offers Continuing Medical Education (CME) at no cost to members through our partnerships with Empathetics, Inc. and Med-IQ. MIEC’s free online CME is a great way for member physicians to work towards annual CME requirements while learning skills to enhance their interactions with patients, maximize patient safety, and reduce liability. MIEC members can complete one, or both, of the Med-IQ and Empathetics programs to earn up to 8 hours of AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. Empathetics: Negative consequences of uncompassionate communication threaten the effectiveness of the overall healthcare experience for patients and their...
As violence increases across the country, so too have acts of violence against healthcare providers. Unfortunately, this is not a new trend; polls conducted in 2014 and 2020 revealed that 71% of physicians and 82% of nurses reported having been targets of violence at some point in their careers, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that healthcare and social service workers are 5 times as likely to suffer a workplace violence injury than workers overall. Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, this epidemic of violence has continued to worsen. An August 2022 poll conducted by the American...
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak and escalating pandemic, in January 2020 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) declared a federal public health emergency (PHE) that is still in effect today. The PHE declaration resulted in numerous waivers of federal laws and regulations impacting the practice of medicine, including telehealth, HIPAA, scope of practice, and Stark laws. The PHE also provides healthcare providers with COVID-related liability protections under the PREP Act. Simultaneously, many individual state medical boards instituted waivers around licensure requirements for out-of-state physicians when providing telehealth services during COVID; these waivers were generally tied to...
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health: Abortion Laws and How Physicians Can Protect Themselves
The recent decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health by the U.S. Supreme Court has pushed the issue of reproductive health back to state legislators. As each state grapples with how it will deal with this issue, it has created tremendous uncertainty for the physicians who serve those communities. Physicians are caught in an impossible situation of trying to care for their patients while operating within the law – with boundaries that are less clear and well-defined as they have been for the past 50 years. As we have for the past 47 years, MIEC will continue to stand with...
Healthcare has a lot of moving parts that rely on multidisciplinary teamwork, communication, and process. When there is a disruption in any one of these areas it can have a compounding effect that leads to frustration, workarounds, and sometimes patient harm. Communication failures continue to be one of the leading causes of sentinel events, which brings us to safety huddles. Daily safety huddles, present an opportunity for staff to flag unsafe conditions and take proactive steps to solve for and eliminate matters that pose a threat to patient safety (Vis, 2021). While safety huddles originated in hospitals, these meetings can...