January 7, 2016

QUESTION:        Our hospital is interested in using an electronic application that allows individuals to schedule a time to come to our Emergency Department by picking a time slot through our website. Is that going to get us in trouble under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (“EMTALA”)?

ANSWER:            It’s a good question. The CMS EMTALA Central Office says that simply using such an electronic application is not in and of itself an EMTALA violation. The key point is how patients are treated when they arrive at the ED.

Per the Central Office, the use is not an EMTALA violation because the potential for an EMTALA violation is interpreted as beginning when the patient presents to the ED or is on the hospital’s property. Once a person arrives at the ED or is on the hospital’s property, EMTALA obligations begin equally for everyone, regardless of any prior contact or communication made. So long as the hospital maintains the obligation to perform an appropriate medical screening examination and stabilizing treatment to everyone equally once a person presents for ED care, any other arrangement is irrelevant to EMTALA compliance.

This means that how the electronic application is used is a key to EMTALA compliance. If it’s used so potential patients can see how crowded the ED might be at any given time and plan an arrival time, and if patients are then triaged and screened according to standard procedure, there should not be an EMTALA problem. If, however, the application is used to allow a patient to move to the front of the line when he or she arrives at the ED or on hospital property regardless of what the hospital’s triage and screening processes say, then there would be an EMTALA concern, and so the potential for a violation.

The bottom line, all must be treated equally when they arrive at the ED.

Opening Microsoft Word files with Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 struggles to open Microsoft Word 2010 files (those that have a .DOCX file extension). If you’re using IE8 and attempt to open documents in DOCX format, IE may try to open it as an XML file, resulting in a screen full of code like this:

Error

 

 

 

There are three potential workarounds for this:

  1. Use a different browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari)
  2. Manually type in the correct file extension
  3. Change a setting in IE

How to manually type in the correct file extension

  • Right click the document you want to save, and choose “Save Target As.”
    save target as
  • Change the file type to “All Files.” And, change the file extension at the end of the file name so it ends in “.DOCX” This will trick your computer into saving the document as a Word file.
    change to docx

 

Please call us at 412.687.7677 if you would like assistance.