Day on Torts
This is Part 4 of my report on medical malpractice filings in Tennessee for 2010. (Here is Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) Today, I examine the county where I live, Williamson County.
Williamson County, Tennessee is on the southern border of Davidson County, which is the home of our state capital, Nashville. In 2010 Williamson County had 180,891 residents. Almost 90 percent of those residents were white and about 5% of them were African-American. The average household income was almost $122,000 per year and the per capita annual income was about $42,000. Over 56% of the people in the county have attained at least one college degree.
Williamson Medical Center is a 185-bed hospital in Franklin. It provides comprehensive inpatient and outpatient care. It has an active emergency room and has physicians on-staff in some 36 specialties.
The hospital had over $130,000,000 in net patient revenue in the year ended June 30, 2009. (I do not have access to more recent data, but almost certainly revenue did not decrease.) There were 33, 286 patient days of admissions at the hospital; about two-thirds of those admitted lived in Williamson County. There were 1341 babies delivered alive, and three born dead. There were35, 601 patients treated in the ER.
The hospital employs 9 physicians and 284 nurses who are involved in patient care. There are 544 physicians who have staff privileges, 516 of whom are board-certified.
It is unclear how many outpatient procedures there are in a given year, but since outpatient revenues are over 60% of all net revenues it is fair to assume that the number is substantial.
There is one other hospital in the county, Rolling Mills Hospital. It is a psych hospital that did $9,000,000 in revenue in fiscal 2009 and had 12,328 in-patient patient days.
There are several ambulatory surgery centers in the county. The Bone and Joint Surgery Center is now owned by Vanderbilt and has 12 surgeons. It did 5026 procedures in 2008. The Cool Springs Surgery Center did 8136 procedures in 2008. The Williamson Surgery Center did 5454 procedures. The Vanderbilt Williamson County Cancer Center did 19,715 treatments on 515 patients.
There are five nursing homes and two outpatient diagnostic centers in the county. There are also three home health agencies.
There were 215 dentists in the county in 2009. I do not know how many dental visits there were in the county. I was unable to learn how many visits there were to doctors’ offices in the county.
In summary, though, I think it is fair to say that there are 1000 or more health care professionals in Williamson County, Tennessee who care for 1000s of patients every single day in a large variety of health care settings. There is a risk of error with each interaction, and a risk of injury connected with some number of the errors.
What was the total number of medical malpractice cases filed against all health care providers in Williamson County, Tennessee in the year ended September 30, 2010?
Four. Just four.