State Lawmakers Blast House GOP's Medical Malpractice Reform Plan

In today's The Hill's Healthwatch the article — State lawmakers blast House GOP's medical malpractice reform bill - mentions a letter from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), expressing strong, bipartisan opposition to attaching federal medical malpractice legislation to the Medicare accountability bill as a "State's rights issue."

"Medical malpractice, product liability and other areas of tort reform are areas of law that are regulated by the states," says the letter from the NCLS. "Since the country's inception, states have addressed the myriad of substantive and regulatory issues regarding licensure, insurance, court procedures, victim compensation, civil liability, medical records and related matters."

Read more on thehill.com.

Sanjay Gupta Writes Novel on Inside World of Medicial Errors

Every time surgeons operate, they're betting their skills are better than the brain tumor, the faulty heart valve, the fractured femur. Sometimes, they're wrong. At Chelsea General, surgeons answer for bad outcomes at the Morbidity and Mortality conference, known as M & M. This extraordinary peek behind the curtain into what is considered the most secretive meeting in all of medicine is the back drop for the entire book.

Monday Mornings: A Novel, by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, follows the lives of five surgeons at Chelsea General as they push the limits of their abilities and confront their personal and professional failings, often in front of their peers at M & M. It is on Monday mornings that reflection and introspection occurs, usually in private. It is Monday Mornings that provides a unique look at the real method in which surgeons learn — through their mistakes. It is Monday Mornings when, if you're lucky, you have a chance at redemption.

Patient Safety: How To Reduce Your Chance of a Medical Error

Here’s what Consumer Reports and Dr. Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine, say patients can do to keep themselves safe when they go to a hospital.

• Do your homework. Go to the Web sites Hospital Compare and the Joint Commission and look up hospitals in your Zip code. Based on that information, ask your doctor which ones they trust.
• Ask a malpractice lawyer which hospitals are safe.
• Find out if the procedure you’re having is one that both your physician and the hospital do often. “You don’t want a doctor or hospital that dabbles in your procedure,” Pronovost says.
• Ask if the physician and hospital use a checklist.
• When you go to the hospital, have a list of all your medications and medical problems and give it to the doctors and nurses caring for you.
• Ask if physicians and nurses have washed their hands before they touch you. You may feel uncomfortable asking this, but it’s for your own safety.
• If you have an invasive device in your body, such as a catheter, either you or a family member or a friend should ask every day if you need to have it in your body and when it can be taken out.
• Bring a friend or family member with you to be your advocate, ask questions, and record the answers.

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

In Pennsylvania, $23 Million Jury Award for Woman Who Lost Both Legs Due to Infection

Headlines out of Allentown, PA's The Morning Call, indicate a medical malpratice lawsuit by a woman who lost both legs due to infection while under care the care of a home care nurse, has been awarded $23 million by a jury. According to the report:

"The medical malpractice verdict, among the highest ever in the county, came after attorneys [the plantiff] argued that her home-care nurse failed to report a bacteria-infected catheter, leading to an infection that nearly killed her in 2008."

To read the article, go to:  Jury awards Lehighton woman $23 million

Lubin & Meyer: Boston Jury Verdict Is $11.48 Million with Interest

Breaking news via Law Links Health Links: Lubin & Meyer announced on its Twitter page tonight that they had won a jury verdict in a case involving the death of an 8-day old baby. After much searching and hand-ringing we found the first report providing more details on the case in the Boston Globe. According to a report in the White Coats Blog, the award was $7 million — $3.5 million for each parent and $50,000 for the newborn's pain and suffering. The $11.48 million is the total with interest. Again, according to the Globe report, the jury found a physician and nurse practitioner negligent in care. They baby developed notnecrotizing enterocolitis. Attorneys for the plaintiff were William J. Thompson and Elizabeth Cranford.

Medical Malpractice Lawsuits Common, Payments Are Not

Kaiser Health News reports on the findings of a study published this month by the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that "only one in five malpractice lawsuits results in a payout. The authors conclude that the truth behind these numbers is complicated."

The study is Malpractice Risk According to Physician Specialty, Anupam B. Jena, M.D., Ph.D., Seth Seabury, Ph.D., Darius Lakdawalla, Ph.D., and Amitabh Chandra, Ph.D. N Engl J Med 2011; 365:629-636

A related Associated Press article on the study in the Philadelphia Inquirer carries these interesting statistics from the study...

• "Only 1 in 5 malpractice claims against doctors leads to a settlement or other payout"
• "Each year about 1 in 14 doctors is the target of a claim"
• "most physicians and virtually every surgeon will face at least one [malpractice claim] in their career"

The chart below summarizes lawsuits and payouts by specialty as found in the study.

To read the full study and methodology, including more charts like the one above, click on: Malpractice Risk According to Physician Specialty to go to www.nejm.org.

New Jersey: Largest Medical Malpractice Verdict in Orange County

According to a report in the Times-Herald Record, an Orange County, New Jersey jury has reached a verdict in the case of a critical-care physician and nurse at Bon Secours Community Hospital accused of a medical error causing a woman to suffer a brain injury and became severely disabled. The jury's damage award includes $19.5 million for future medical and rehabilitation services for the patient and $5 million for her husband. Read the full news item here. (Note, the newspaper lists the verdict at $34 million, while the amounts published do not match the amount claimed in the headline. The difference may be interest on the verdict, however, no other information was attainable at the time of this post.)

McDonald Hopkins Files Federal Lawsuit Challenging Constitutionality of Illinois Law

CHICAGO, IL — Hospital-based pathology groups and physicians in Illinois have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to invalidate, on constitutional grounds, Illinois legislation designed to shift the burden of absorbing certain patient-related costs from insurers to practitioners of only a few specifically-enumerated medical specialties. The Statute is Illinois Public Act 96-1523, and you can read the full alert here: Hospital-based physicians seek to invalidate law

Outpatient Electronic Prescribing Systems Don’t Cut Out Common Mistakes

Outpatient electronic prescribing systems don’t cut out the common mistakes made in manual systems, suggests research published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

And not all systems are the same: some perform worse than others, the study shows.

The rapid adoption of electronic prescribing systems has in part been fuelled by the belief that they would reduce the sorts of errors commonly made in manual prescribing systems, the authors say.
The authors base their findings on an analysis of just under 4,000 computer generated prescriptions received by a commercial pharmacy chain in three different US states over a period of four weeks in 2008.

They looked at the number of mistakes made and their potential to cause harm, as well as the frequency of particular mistakes and whether these were associated with one type of system.
Of the 3,850 prescriptions assessed, more than one in 10 (452; just under 12%) contained a total of 466 errors.

Of these, a third (163; 35%) were deemed to be potentially harmful.

Mistakes were classified as: “significant,” but posing little serious threat to life, such as rash, headache, or diarrhoea; serious but not life threatening, such as low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia), reduced heart rate (bradycardia), and fainting (syncope); and life threatening if not treated, such as heart attack and respiratory failure.

Among the 163 potentially harmful errors, over half (58%) were significant and the remainder (42%) were serious. None was life threatening. To read the full press release, see: E-Prescriptions.

Send Us News of Your Medical Malpractice Verdict or Settlement

Medical Malpractice Law News seeks to aggregate news and trends on medical malpractice topics including mentions of significant settlements and trial verdicts in your state. Please forward news releases or a summary of key points with credible links to confirm your news. We will consider using your submissions, but reserve the right to edit or turn it down based on relevance to our audience and our ability to confirm facts and sources. Please copy and paste your submission directly into our "comment" form, which is the best way for us to see it right away.

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California Jury Awards $4.5 Million

A wrongful death medical malpractice trial that ended in a hung jury a year ago, this time ended in a jury awarding "...$3.5 million in general damages, including pain and suffering, and more than $1 million in economic damages," according to the Pasadena Star-News. See article: La Canada Flintridge physician loses medical malpractice case - Pasadena Star-News.

Who Benefits from Medical Malpractice Caps, Doctors or Insurers?

In an article about New York's debate over medical malpractice caps, the New York Times looks at California's experience with caps, writing:

"...states that have similar caps in place offer cautionary evidence about the big savings for health care providers that such limits are believed to produce.

In 1975, California lawmakers approved a $250,000 cap on so-called noneconomic damages in cases of medical mistakes, which has since become a model for similar proposals. At least 35 states now have at least some limits on malpractice damages."

The article, Lessons for Albany on Malpractice Limits, goes on to cite numbers from the Physician Insurers Association of America that show California and three other states with "$250,000 caps in place in 1991 saw premiums increase 28 percent in the following decade."

For the full article and analysis, link to the article on NYT at: Limits on Medical Malpractice Awards Show Mixed Results.

Pennsylvania Leader in Reporting 'Never Events'

The Allentown, PA Morning Call published a lengthy article by Tim Darragh on wrong-site surgery in Pennsylvania. The report titled, 'Never events' happen dozens of times a year, starts with this lead in...

"More than five times a month, every month, a doctor in Pennsylvania commits one of the medical establishment's greatest taboos — working on the wrong part of a patient's body, or even the wrong patient. Since the state Patient Safety Authority began collecting data in mid-2004, health care facilities have reported 416 "wrong-site surgeries," an average of 64 a year, the authority reported this month."

Click here to read the full article.

In Connecticut, 'Safe Harbor' Language Causes Stir

New London, Connecticut's Day.com carries an editorial by John Foley, a former cardiologist, regarding the importance of 'safe harbor' offered by adhering to evidence-based medicine practices. The state's SustiNet legislation recently had the safe harbor language remo which has physicians up in arms. Click here to read more on what's happening on this issue.

Mass General Lawsuit Hopes To Change Internal Policies

A recent lawsuit filed against Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston provides the family of a woman who died as the result of a medical error with an opportunity to push for changes in hospital policies. The family's attorney Drew Meyer said in a Fox News interview that what the family is pushing for "is some recognition by Mass General that they are changing their policies." See video below...

Family sues MGH after woman dies in mix-up: MyFoxBOSTON.com

UPDATE  8-19-11: The plaintiff lawyer's trial report is now available on this lawsuit, which settled for $2.5 million. To read, click on: Medication Error Trial Report.

In New Hampshire, Medical Malpractice Screening Panels Under Review

From sister website NH Medical Malpractice News, is a post providing the number of cases that have come before New Hampshire's medical malpractice screening panels...

"... there have been some 387 cases brought to the attention of screening panels since 2007, with 147 resolved prior to panel review. Of the 240 remaining cases 87 were waived, 84 have been heard and 69 are pending as of Dec. 10. Only 18 medical malpractice cases have gone to a jury trial after panel review since 2007."

For the full article please see: The jury's still out on malpractice panels

In Montana, $1.7 Million Jury Award

The Missoulan reports via Associated Press article on a medical malpractice jury award of $1.7 million in a lawsuit filed by a family over the death of a father/husband that alleged his chest pain was misdiagnosed as a torn muscle, rather than a leaky heart valve. via share this

In Florida, $19.2 Million for Medical Error in Newborn

In Lee County Florida comes news of a medical malpractice lawsuit with a $19.2 million award filed by a family who's premature infant was given 100 times the intended dose of nutrients leading to cardiac arrest and complications believed to lead to cerebral palsy and blindness. See the report from Channel 2 RSW Florida below.


To read the full story, click on: Florida med mal.

Looking at Mediation Instead of Trial for Medical Malpractice Cases

NPR's Health Blog, Shots, carries a post briefly outlining some of the financial incentives of mediation v. trial for medical malpractice cases. Writes author Michelle Andrews:

"Plaintiff's lawyers typically work on a contingency basis in medical malpractice cases, earning about 30 percent of the settlement amount. Although there are no hard data, mediation settlements tend to be smaller than jury awards, say experts."

But, she adds, "there's no jury to convince, so the money's a sure thing, and they may get it years sooner than they would if the case went to trial."

To read the full post, please click on: Mediation v. Trial.

Medical Liability/Medical Malpractice Laws by State

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) does a great job of documenting medical liability/malpractice laws and legislation by state. We feature a link to the list in our Medical Malpractice Resources section, but thought a post here was in order to better publicize this excellent resource. The information is available in a chart that summarizes, by state, the following information:

• Damage Award Limits or Cap
• Statute of Limitation
• Joint and Several Liability
• Limits on Attorney Fees
• Patient Compensation or Injury Fund
• Doctor Apologies/Sympathetic Gestures
• Pre-trial Alternative Dispute Resolution and Screening Panels
• Affidavit or Certificate of Merit
• Expert Witness Standards
• Medical or Peer Review Panels

See the NCSL state-by-state comparison of laws here: Medical Malpractice Laws by State.