Physicians writing on KevinMD about being sued and about making mistakes: the summons, the deposition, and the verdict that does not feel like winning, whether damage caps and safe harbors work, frivolous claims argued from both sides, expert witnesses, nuclear verdicts and premiums, apology laws, and how physicians say errors happen and what it is like to make one. Two maintained records draw on this archive: Medical malpractice: what physicians say, in their own words and Medical errors: what physicians say, in their own words.
In anticipation of American Heart Month, an examination of the liability risks faced by cardiologists was recently undertaken by The Doctors Company, the nation’s largest physician-owned medical malpractice insurer. This analysis of 429 closed cardiology claims from 2007 to 2013 revealed that the most common patient allegations against cardiologists and other clinicians were diagnostic errors, followed closely by procedural or surgical mishaps. This data is of particular interest to cardiologists, …
With the endless appearance of medical malpractice solutions in the press, any reader would think we have the answers to the logjam — but no will to implement them. If you follow the topic, you know every proposal has flaws and limited applications as they relate to individual states or delivery systems.
The worst offender seems to be safe harbor protections (i.e., “follow the …
While the electronic medical record (EMR) has advantages, it also has introduced liability risks. EMRs can lead to lawsuits or result in a weak defense by casting the physician in an unfavorable light.
For example, examine these exchanges in a recent malpractice trial:
Plaintiff attorney: Doctor, if the emergency renal consult was called in at 11:30, why did you wait until 6 p.m. …
New York Post reporter Susan Edelman revealed the name of the unfortunate anesthesiologist allegedly present on August 28 at Yorkville Endoscopy, during the throat procedure that led to the death of comedian Joan Rivers. She is reported to be Renuka Reddy Bankulla, MD, 47, a board-certified anesthesiologist from New Rochelle, NY.
Having her name made public will be a nightmare for Dr. Bankulla, as …
Dostoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov cleverly spoofs the careless inexpertness of what often passes for expert legal testimony.
Three medical experts are called to testify whether Dmitri Karamazov was sane or insane when committing the alleged murder of his father. Naturally, the experts all disagree, with each completely convinced of the incontrovertible truth of his own opinion. Expert 1 finds Dmitri insane because he looked to the left as he entered the courtroom. Expert …
“If doctors do no other good, they at least prepare their patients early for death, undermining little by little and cutting off their enjoyment of life.”
These words from Montaigne are 350 years old, but, sadly, too often they describe the results of modern medicine, particularly when it is mindlessly applied in a needlessly heroic way to the end of life.
The safety concerns that keep clinicians awake at night often aren’t issues that you could fit onto a safety and quality dashboard. They aren’t the kinds of things that feed metrics on the CMS Hospital Compare website or any of the other sources of publicly reported quality measures. They are intensely local, and no less important for being so.
This reminder came to me recently during a quarterly meeting of Comprehensive Unit-based …
I was listening to the news on my way to work recently, and heard a story about the review conducted after the well-publicized security breach at the White House. Like many people, I was shocked when the story of the fence-jumper first broke. How was it possible that some guy with a knife managed to get over the fence, cross the lawn, enter the White House and get deep into the …
The aspect of malpractice suits that lawyers seem congenitally unable to understand is how devastating it is. “Ho hum,” says a lawyer who read my first two posts in this series. “Get out the violins.” It’s as if, because I make my living operating on …
Is it about physician drug testing? Is it about allaying the pain and suffering of families of patients whose outcomes have been devastating and tragic? Is it about the compensation of the legal counsel who represent those families and patients?
Truthfully, I don’t want to talk about 46. I think the issue is very much deeper and the process that underlies medical malpractice litigation has consequences for individuals and society that …
The New York Times has reported on a woman who wanted to deliver vaginally and claims she was forced to have a repeat C-section (her third C-section) against her will. I can’t comment on the veracity of her claims, however a forced C-section is never, ever acceptable. It doesn’t mater if the fetus has an agonal rhythm (is visibly dying on the monitor), as an OB your role is …
I realized I was entering into a process the rules of which were entirely separate from normal human interaction when it hit me that news of the lawsuit was in the newspaper before anyone had had the decency to contact me. What kind of people act like that? Civilized behavior, respectfulness — in short, all the ways in which you’d think nice …
If you are a physician like me who performs procedures, then rarely you will cause a medical complication. This is a reality of medical life. If perforation of the colon with colonoscopy occurs at a rate of 1 in 1,500, and you do 3,000 colonoscopies each year, then you can do the math.
Remember that a complication is a blameless event, in contrast to a negligent act when the physician is …
In all my years of practice, my dad called me at the office only twice. The second was to inform me of a horrible family tragedy. The first — well, I guess in a small way you could say it was the same.
California is contemplating requiring physicians to submit to alcohol and drug testing. Citizens there will be voting on this proposal this November. I do think that the public is entitled to be treated by physicians who are unimpaired. Physicians, as members of the human species, have the same vices and frailties as the rest of us.
I have no objection to this new requirement, if it passes. This will not be …
November, 1999 was a watershed for physicians. It is then that the infamous “To Err is Human” report was issued by the Institute of Medicine claiming that close to 100,000 patients were needlessly dying due to preventable medical errors. The report was a bombshell, having a significant impact on how medicine was practiced. 15 years later we are still evaluating that impact.
When things go wrong in medicine, as they invariably do, we try to figure out what went wrong, and why. We try to learn if there’s anything we could have done better and what we should do next time.
It used to be, in the days of the giants, that the physician responsible for the patient with the bad outcome presented the case during a morbidity and mortality (M&M) conference. It was …
Physicians in California are mobilizing to oppose an initiative on the November ballot that will raise the cap on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases. The current cap of $250,000 is part of California’s Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, or MICRA. Adopted in …
I saw the caller ID and immediately picked up the phone; it was an old friend from college.
“I want to sue a doctor, and I want to sue the hospital,” said Karen.
Sadly, I hear those words all too often. I’m a newly-minted lawyer — after a 35-year career as a publisher — working at one of New York’s top medical malpractice plaintiff’s firms. What made this particular call so unusual …
