Articles Posted in Medical Negligence

The Tennessee Bar Association is sponsoring a seminar to educate lawyers on the new medical malpractice statute passed by the Senate earlier today.  If signed by the Governor, and there is no reason to believe that he will not sign the bill, the legislation makes major changes in medical malpractice procedural law.  The TBA has selected me as the speaker for this program.

The seminar will be webcast at 11:00 CDT on Monday, June 15, 2009.

A portion of the legislation is effective July 1, 2009 , but the transitional issues will be discussed in the seminar.  Each provision of the legislation will be discussed in detail.  I participated in all of the negotiations concerning this legislation and will provide a history of how the legislation developed.

The Tennessee Bar Association is sponsoring a seminar to educate lawyers on the new medical malpractice statute passed by the Senate earlier today.  If signed by the Governor, and there is no reason to believe that he will not sign the bill, the legislation makes major changes in medical malpractice procedural law.  The TBA has selected me as the speaker for this program.

The seminar will be webcast at 11:00 CDT on Monday, June 15, 2009.

A portion of the legislation is effective July 1, 2009 , but the transitional issues will be discussed in the seminar.  Each provision of the legislation will be discussed in detail.  I participated in all of the negotiations concerning this legislation and will provide a history of how the legislation developed.

SB  2109   passed the Senate at 11:36 and is now on its way to the Governor’s desk.  The Bill  passed the House (HB2233) in May.   There is no indication that the Governor will not sign the legislation.

The bill dramatically changes the law that came into effect just last October 1, and impacts both the pre-suit notice and the certificate of merit provisions.   The effective date of the bill is a little tricky and bears careful study, but the notice provisions come into effect July 1, 2009.

Generally speaking, the law makes it easier to give notice of a potential medical malpractice claim and gives more specifics about what the notice must say.  It also requires that the claimant provide a HIPPA-compliant authorization with the notice.

Last year I wrote about the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance’s 2008 Medical Malpractice Claims Report.  The report revealed data from medical malpractice cases settled and tried in Tennessee in calendar year 2007.

The numbers:

Total judgments for plaintiffs  

On Tuesday  I posted  David B. Troxel, MD’s article in The Doctor’s Advocate about VTE.  Today, I include another article by the same doctor – this one about diagnosis and treatment of PE.

Here it is.

To be precise, I am not talking about iPhones.  I am talking about the apps for iPhones.  There are hundreds and hundreds of iPhone apps for health care providers that permit one to help formulate a differential diagnosis, check for drug-drug interactions, or identify medications.

So, does the standard of care require a doctor to buy and use these apps relevant to his or her field?

Not today.  But as time goes on look for the standard of care to include either the knowledge of relevant data that can be gathered from such sources or ready means to access it via iPhone, Blackberry, etc.  Medical students are already being trained for the use of these devices, and it is only natural that the standard of care will ultimately incorporate the use of  these tools.

David B. Troxel, MD of the Doctors Company has written a great article about VTE inThe Doctor’s Advocate..  The article reviews the risk factors for VTE, the prevention of VTE, and the diagnosis of DVT and includes a reference to the American College of Chest Physicians’ guidelines.

Read here – and learn.

SVMIC, the medical malpractice insurer owned by doctors for doctors, has published information about a seminar it offered to its insureds addressing the issue of surgical checklists.

This is how SVMIC describes the seminar it called "“Applied Aviation Safety Practices for Surgeons and Anesthesiologists:”

The basic premise of these seminars was that human errors, often supported by poorly designed systems, are the primary cause of preventable patient deaths and injuries. These human errors share similarities with, and will respond to, many of the same error reduction methods used in high reliability industries such as aviation and nuclear power. One of the hallmarks of high reliability industries is the conscientious and consistent use of checklists.

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:

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 the five-year “look-back” at previous negative Pap smears following the diagnosis of HSIL/carcinoma found that 10 percent of prior smears were false negatives for SIL/carcinoma. If atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance (ASC-US) were included, 20 percent of prior smears were false negatives. In 1996, the American Cancer Society predicted 15,700 new cases of cervical cancer and 4,700 deaths. Published studies indicated that 60–75 percent of women dying from cervical cancer either never had a Pap smear or had not had one in the five years prior to diagnosis. Therefore, if one assumed that 40 percent of the predicted new cases of cervical carcinoma had a single Pap smear in the prior five years with a 20 percent false-negative rate, there was a potential for 1,256 new claims for failure to diagnose cervical carcinoma on a Pap smear in 1996 alone!  [Footnotes omitted.]