The Doctors Company, a medical malpractice insurer, has published this article about keeping medical records. An excerpt: The following entries should appear in the office or hospital records of each patient: Results of a patient’s physical examination, specifically noting the absence of abnormality. Patient history, a list of all medications…
One medical malpractice insurer, The Doctors Company, has an interesting article on medical malpractice claims concerning pap smears. Here is a excerpt from the article that discusses the scope of the problem: To put the potential magnitude of this problem in perspective, a College of American Pathologists (CAP) study of…
Public Citizen ranks Tennessee 40th in its 2008 ranking of serious doctor disciplinary actions taken by state medical licensing boards. The Tennessee board took a total of 40 serious disciplinary actions against the 18,137 doctors in Tennessee, or a total of 2.44 actions per 1000 physicians. The total leading states were Alaska…
Many of us know that doctors prescribe drugs for uses other than those approved by the FDA. This article discusses off-label drug prescribing and suggests that physicians who prescribe a drug for an off-label use follow the following steps to obtain informed consent: a statement that the off-label use is…
The Idaho Supreme Court has permitted an expert to opine that two defendants in a medical negligence case engaged in not just negligent but reckless conduct. In Jones v. Crawford, 2009 Opinion 53 (Idaho S. Ct. April 8, 2009), a defendant appealed from an adverse jury verdict in a wrongful…
Here are the 28 medical events that the National Quality Forum says should never occur: Surgical Events Surgery performed on the wrong body part Surgery performed on the wrong patient Wrong surgical procedure on a patient Retention of a foreign object in a patient after surgery or other procedure Intraoperative…
These are not the words of some crazy plaintiff’s lawyer. These are the words of a doctor. Dr. Amy Tuteur at Harvard. An excerpt: "If I had been angry about what happened to the patient, I was even angrier after learning of the deception. The hospital had deliberately lied to…
From the March 30, 2009 edition of Courtoons.
It was four years ago today that I wrote about the ability of Senator Bill Frist to make a medical diagnosis via videotape. Here is my follow-up post from June 16, 2005, written after the release of Ms. Schiavo’s autopsy. Did Dr. Frist’s videotape diagnosis cost him a shot at the…
We have some preliminary data on the number of medical malpractice case filings in certain counties since the October 1, 2009 effective date of the medical malpractice notice and certificate of good faith statutes. One new statute requires that actual notice be given to defendants in med mal cases before a lawsuit is filed. …