Today, we’re getting lectured on EMTALA. It’s interesting to hear the interpretation from a lawyer who’s teaching the class, than it is through the physician author’s POV. I’ve been pretty interested in legal aspects of health care and early in my research EMTALA came up a lot, so I’ve had lots of conversations with this author. 

EMTALA stands for the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. It is most well known as an anti-patient dumping law, but its powers extend far beyond that. While it was borne out of such actions by hospitals’ refusal to treat certain patients for various reasons (liability issues, inability to pay, etc.). 

Basically there are three primary requirements: 

• The hospital must provide an appropriate medical screening exam to anyone coming to the ED seeking medical care;
• For anyone that comes to the hospital and the hospital determines that the individual has an emergency medical condition, the hospital must treat and stabilize the emergency medical condition, or the hospital must transfer the individual; and
• A hospital must not transfer an individual with an emergency medical condition that has not been stabilized unless several conditions are met that includes effecting an appropriate transfer. 

Of course there’s a lot more statutes involved with this as well as numerous problems that are associated with this particular law. Since its inception there have been many amendments that help to clarify boundaries and ambiguities. 

We spent less than 10 minutes on this. sigh.