FDA

The electronic health records industry is "gearing up for a Washington lobbying fight against federal safety regulations," the Boston Globe reports. The Obama administration is going to release plans in the coming months on how information technology in the health industry should be regulated. The issue is "whether the systems should be considered medical devices and, therefore, regulated by the Food and Drug Administration just as a cardiac stent or a pacemaker is regulated," the Globe also reports.

Some say that electronic health records, also known as digital medical records, can lead to prescribing errors or other errors in patient care that harm patients, the Globe further reports.

ProPublica and This American Life put together a pretty amazing reporting project about how 150 Americans die every year by taking too much acetaminophen, Tylenol's active ingredient, and that there were decades-long delays in providing updated consumer warnings that using too much of over-the-counter painkillers with acetaminophen could lead to liver toxicity and even death. This spring, I reported for The Legal Intelligencer that a federal multidistrict litigation for plaintiffs who allege that their use of over-the-counter Tylenol caused their livers to fail or be poisoned was approved to be presided in front of U.S. District Judge Lawrence F. Stengel of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania: http://www.law.com/jsp/pa/PubArticlePA.jsp?id=1202594695498&slreturn=201...

Many more cases may be generated in the MDL in light of this reporting project.

If you haven't read and/or listened to ProPublica and This American Life's reportage, here it is:

http://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-kids-dose-of-confusion

http://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-use-only-as-directed

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/505/use-only-as-d...

Read more: http://www.law.com/jsp/pa/PubArticlePA.jsp?id=1202594695498&slreturn=201...

http://www.law.com/jsp/pa/PubArticlePA.jsp?id=1202594695498&slreturn=201...