Recently in Medical Malpractice Category

Most New Englanders can recite half the names on the roster of the Super Bowl-bound Patriots. But most  New Englanders, myself included, would be hard-pressed to identify Dr. Mary Ellen Avery. And that is a travesty. Dr. Avery’s life, and passing, came to my attention several weeks ago in her obituary in The New York [...]

Last week, Dr. Donald Berwick resigned as the acting head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) after it became obvious that his formal appointment to the position would never be put to a vote in the Senate and, if it were, Senate Republicans would vote him down. As blogger Harold Pollack points [...]

As we’re fond of reminding you here, the costs of medical malpractice don’t amount to a hill of beans when it comes to our health care spending. The legal fees and payouts from medical malpractice amount to 0.5% of our health care spending. It would be a great thing for the tens of thousands of [...]

In this week’s news were a couple of stories that I thought made neat medical malpractice hypotheticals. The first comes from a new research study showing that doctors who take so-called “smart drugs” (drugs that improve focus and concentration like ADHD drugs and anti-narcoleptic drug Modafinil) perform better than doctors who don’t. The study prompted [...]

Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran a chilling story on the prevalence of doctor-owned medical device companies and the conflicts of interest that arise when doctors are implanting medical devices whose sales they profit from. The heart of the story involved a 48-year old Baptist preacher named Gary Steven Moore. Moore died on the [...]

Today I was reading a great blog post over at KevinMD.com. Much of it had me nodding in agreement with the physician-blogger who wrote it. The blog post’s title was “Lawsuits Are More Of An Emotional Issue Than A Financial Issue” and the author made many sound points. As the author pointed out, it makes [...]

Dr, Atul Gawande, one of the heroes of this blog, has a great new article in The New Yorker on the importance of coaches in improving performance. As Dr. Gawande notes in his article, for the first several years after becoming a surgeon, the rate of complication in operations he performed declined — until he [...]

Last summer, a 60-year old man died at UMass Memorial Hospital. Apparently, for an hour before the man’s death, alarm bells were ringing indicating that the patient had a fast heart rate and potential breathing problems. But the alarms went unanswered. The incident was only reported to state officials this spring and, according to The [...]

Last week, The Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts think tank, issued a white paper dubiously entitled, “Innovative Medical Liability Reform: Traditional and Non-Traditional Methods,” in an effort to persuade Beacon Hill to adopt tort reform measures that include caps on non-economic damages and protections for medical malpractice insurers that would enable the insurers to pay out [...]