Teresa Sigmon, attorney for the defendant in a medical malpractice case, allegedly pressured one of the plaintiff’s consulting experts in the case into withdrawing from an agreement to testify for the plaintiff. The plaintiff then sued her, her law firm, and the the medical malpractice insurer for “abuse of process,…
It is getting worse. A study of patients in our Medicare population has found an alarming number of incidents and deaths. The study looked discharge records of Medicare patients and used 16 of “20 indicators for potentially preventable patient safety incidents that could be readily identified in hospital discharge data.…
The Washington Post tells us that hospital-acquired infections cost more than $600M per year – and that is just in Pennsylvania! An excerpt from the article: “Doctors, nurses and patients’ relatives have long known the risks of contracting an infection while in a hospital. But there has been little quantifiable…
John Ritter died of an aortic aneurysm in 2003. His family filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against various health care providers. It now appears that the case has been settled. I met John Ritter in New York 5 or 6 years ago. I went to a play and at the…
This op-ed piece from today’s New York Times is so good it needs to be repeated in full in this blog. The Doctor Will See You for Exactly Seven Minutes By PETER SALGO WHEN politicians speak of America’s health care needs, they often miss an important point: the doctor-patient relationship…
The locality rule in medical malpractice cases is absolutely ridiculous. It is designed to create an artifical barrier to recovery, to protect doctors and hospitals, particularly those in rural areas, from malpractice suits. It pretends that there is a difference in the standard of care given the size of the…
Back in 1975 the Tennessee Legislature determined that the only health care providers who could testify against a Tennessee health care provider in a malpractice case where experts from contigious states. This is an assine rule – but it is still the law. You can avoid the contigious state rule…
The Tennessee Peer Review Law of 1967 was “was passed with the stated intent of encouraging ‘committees made up of Tennessee’s licensed physicians to candidly, conscientiously, and objectively evaluate and review their peers’ professional conduct, competence, and ability to practice medicine.’ The statute further ‘recognizes that confidentiality is essential both…
The Ohio Supreme Court has released a decision in a wrongful birth case. Read about it our medical malpractice blog.
The Supreme Court of Mississippi has granted summary judgment in favor of a physician when the plaintiff failed to timely respond to discovery seeking information about plaintiff’s expert witnesses and did not timely file an expert affidavit opposing the summary judgment motion. Plaintiff maintained that she was entitled to more…