Brain or Spinal Cord Injury

The AP (4/11, Kageyama) reports, “Toyota, Honda and Nissan are recalling more than 2 million vehicles globally for an identical problem with air bags on the passenger side whose inflator may burst, sending plastic pieces flying.” The AP notes that “the recall for air bags made by Japan’s Takata Corp. affects other automakers including non-Japanese manufacturers, and may be as many as 3 million vehicles, Takata spokesman Akiko Watanabe said Thursday.” The AP notes that “a worker forgot to turn on the switch for a system weeding out defective products and parts were improperly stored, which exposed them to humidity, according to Honda spokeswoman Akemi Ando.”
CNN Money (4/11, Riley, Wakatsuki) also reports that “Honda said it was aware of one crash in which a passenger front airbag casing had ruptured after being deployed with too much pressure” but is not aware of any injuries or deaths resulting from the defect. Meanwhile, “Toyota said it had reports of five airbag malfunctions, but no injuries.”

Accidents involving cars, trucks, and motorcycles can result in serious personal injuries to drivers, passengers and pedestrians. The Chicago law firm of Lane Brown, LLC practices in personal-injury lawsuits resulting from vehicle accidents. If you, your family or other loved one has been injured, please contact Lane Brown, LLC. We can help.

The National Law Journal (4/2, Bronstad) reports, “A lawsuit filed against Ford Motor Co. on behalf of consumers alleging economic damages tied to sudden acceleration comes months after Toyota Motor Corp. agreed to pay more than $1 billion in cash and repair costs to resolve similar claims.” The Journal continues, “The suit, filed on March 28, asserts that Ford, despite receiving hundreds of reports of electronics defects tied to sudden acceleration, failed to install brake override systems in some North American vehicles until 2010, even though it knew about problems as early as 2002. As a result, the cars manufactured during that interval put drivers in an ‘unreasonably dangerous’ situation, the suit says.”

If you or a loved one have suffered a severe injury, the law offices of Lane Brown, LLC can help you. Please contact us or call now (312) 332-1400 for an immediate consultation with an injury attorney in Chicago, Illinois.

If you suspect a manufacturing or design defect caused your auto accident and serious injury, we invite you to contact our office. A lawyer with experience in defective equipment claims will provide a free consultation and case review.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for Americans. At the first sign of heart problems, we turn to a cardiologist for help. In order to diagnose and determine the best treatment for a heart condition, cardiologists often order a cardiac catheterization procedure. While necessary for many, the procedure is not without risks including the following:

Excessive bleeding at the site where the catheterization tube enters the artery
Potential blood clots in the arm or leg, which may lead to amputation
Internal bleeding into the abdomen in the event the artery is during the procedure

A cardiac catheterization procedure serves as a vital diagnostic tool to evaluate the condition of the heart. However, if a patient comes into the emergency room with symptoms that mimic a heart condition, such as indigestion, or abnormal, yet inconclusive, stress test results, this test may be unnecessary and extremely risky.

Sometimes, during a diagnostic cardiac catheterization procedure, doctors find a narrow or blocked artery. They are often able to clear the blockage right away using arterial stents. This procedure, while it can be life saving, also carries risks such as the following:

Equipment could cause a clogged blood vessel, which may block necessary oxygen from the heart
Equipment could puncture the coronary artery
Patients could experience complications including heart attack, stroke, and death. According to one study, one or two out of every 100 patients experience complications.
Stents can cause a build-up of scar tissue at their location. They can also cause blood clots to develop, which could cause a massive heart attack.

If you recently had a cardiac catheterization procedure, and suffered injuries afterwards, you may be the victim of medical negligence. Only an experienced Chicago medical malpractice attorney at Lane Brown can evaluate the details of your injuries, consult with qualified medical professionals, and determine if you have a legal claim. Call us today at 312-332-1400 for a free case evaluation. We are here to help.

Kudos to the American Association for Justice (AAJ)! Today AAJ filed comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on proposed rulemaking governing the regulation of used cars and the installment of event data recorders in cars, respectively.

The proposed rules by the FTC regarding the sale of used motor vehicles raised consumer protection concerns and AAJ’s comments focused on the liability issues expressed during the Regulatory Review Notice comment period. AAJ specifically opposes the creation of a “safe harbor” for car dealers even if they demonstrate compliance with proposed disclosure requirements.

Comments to NHTSA responded to the agency’s proposal that all light vehicles be equipped with event data recorders (EDRs) or “black boxes” by September 2014. AAJ urged NHTSA to strengthen their regulatory framework by enhancing the availability of EDR data as well as ensuring data accuracy. Also, data recorder equipment malfunctions should not bar litigants from fully investigating their cases through formal discovery requests.

The American Hospital Association (AHA) has established new guidelines for managing patients who are suspected of having suffered a stroke. Eligible patients presenting to the hospital with ischemic stroke should receive recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rTPA) within 60 minutes of arrival, according to the new ischemic stroke guidelines.
Published in Stroke, the guidelines include the following new or revised recommendations:
• Patients with suspected stroke should be quickly taken to the closest certified primary stroke center or comprehensive stroke center. If no such centers exist, they should be taken to the most appropriate institution that provides emergency stroke care.
• In community hospitals without onsite stroke expertise, telestroke consultation with stroke education and training for clinicians could help increase use of rTPA.
• Intravenous fibrinolysis may be considered in patients with mild stroke deficits, rapidly improving stroke symptoms, major surgery in the prior 3 months, and recent myocardial infarction.
• Efforts should be made to reduce the time from symptom onset to reperfusion with intra-arterial therapies.

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.