Recently in Medical Malpractice Category

The headlines are hard to reconcile. This week, the journal Health Affairs published an article showing that American doctors are paid more per service – in some cases double! – than any of their foreign counterparts. American primary care physicians are paid approximately seventy percent more per office visit than doctors in other developed countries. [...]

It’s a familiar theme: Americans spend the most on health care, and often get the least in return. Last December, I blogged about how we spend the most per patient on dialysis treatment and have the world’s highest dialysis mortality rate. Now, from medicalcodingandbillingcertification.net, comes a new infograph that sets out how our hospitals are [...]

We’ve blogged before about so-called “medical hot spotting.” The technique promises to bring down the costs of health care dramatically by concentrating health care resources in the right places, much like, in the mid-1990s, police began to bring down crime rates by concentrating police patrols in the right areas. Now PBS’ Frontline has done a [...]

Kaiser Health, one of the largest health insurance companies in the nation, is suing Prime Health Services, Inc., for taking Emergency Room patients and unnecessarily having them stay for extended periods of times on an in-patient basis, as part of an alleged scheme to drive up the price tag of the hospital visits. Patients who [...]

In 2003, Dr. Elizabeth McGlynn and her coauthors published a blockbuster study in The New England Journal of Medicine showing that American doctors follow evidence-based guidelines only 54 percent of the time, meaning that when you receive medical treatment there’s a 50/50 chance that the treatment you’re receiving has no scientific validity to it. The [...]

Via Andrew Sullivan, a very interesting pie chart: It’s from research by economist Aaron Caroll, showing that states that have enacted caps on damages in medical malpractice cases haven’t reaped savings. This shouldn’t come as any surprise given that all of the costs associated with medical malpractice – from medical bills for the injured to [...]

Today’s Los Angeles Times carries an op-ed co-authored by Dr. Lucian Leape of Harvard’s School of Public Health on the topic of resident fatigue. July marks the month that young doctors begin their residencies at teaching hospitals across the country. This month also marks the fortieth anniversary of a landmark article published in The New [...]

As reported by The Washington Post, a new report by a hospital accreditation body estimates that so-called wrong site surgeries take place 40 times each week in the nation’s hospitals. Wrong site surgeries are operations that take place on the wrong part of the body, such as amputations of healthy limbs, back surgeries that are [...]

The Massachusetts legislature is weighing a bill that would give patients the right to have their surgery videotaped if they paid for the recording. Hospitals that refused to allow videotaping would face a $10,000 fine. The bill had a hearing Tuesday before the Public Health Commission. Personally, I think that in many surgeries the videos [...]