Recently in Medical Malpractice Category

This summer the journal Health Affairs concluded that the costs of medical malpractice lawsuits make up 2.5% of our health care spending. About 0.5% of that was payouts to compensate the victims of medical malpratice; the remainder was the costs of “defensive medicine” practiced by doctors. The article found that the malpractice costs were a [...]

Over at the California Consumer Attorneys blog, J.G. Preston asks a question that every Congressman who supports H.R. 5, the bill to put a $250,000 cap on damages for pain-and-suffering in medical malpractice lawsuits, should be asking: Why are lives lost to medical malpractice not as valuable as other lives? This Wednesday, The New York [...]

A couple of weeks ago, after President Obama’s State of the Union, I blogged about seven ideas to cut the costs of our health care. Ideas that, unlike medical malpractice “reform,” would really make a dent in our health care spending. One of the ideas was promoting the use of medical “hotspotting” – identifying the [...]

A while ago, I blogged about a new Massachusetts database that allows patients to look up all payments that drug and medical device companies have made to their doctors. It’s a nice tool but it’s not very user-friendly. ProPublica has compiled a more limited but more user-friendly database that details the payments that eight drug [...]

Whistleblowing doctor fired – Medpage reports that a cardiologist whose research revealed that a number of cardiologists, including those at her own hospital, were misreading echocardiograms has been fired by her hospital. The researcher, Kiran Sagar, said in an interview, “The cardiologists weren’t happy. I think behind the scenes they were saying, ‘How can you [...]

Republicans can’t wrap their heads around the idea that sometimes the most efficient markets are not the freest ones, and so they don’t really have any positive proposals for what to do about our health care mess. They don’t, for example, have any proposals for what to do about the fifty percent of Americans who [...]

If there’s one theme that this blog has hammered away at relentlessly, it’s the importance of checklists in improving patient safety. In a massive World Health Organization study, checklists were shown to reduce surgical deaths by forty-seven percent and major complications by thirty-six percent. Yet only one-quarter of American hospitals are using checklists. Now comes [...]

As reported by Liz Kowalczyk of the Boston Globe, Massachusetts has become the first state in the nation to post online all payments that drug and medical device companies make to the state’s health care providers. You can use the database for yourself by clicking here. For years, Minnesota has published similar information regarding its [...]

Over the past four months, orthopedic surgeons at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have committed the same surgical error three different times – by operating on the wrong vertebra of patients undergoing back surgery. According to recent news stories about the errors, two of the “wrong site” surgical errors were uncovered only after patients complaining [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the divergent approaches that we have taken to addressing the public health problems of medical malpractice and auto accidents. We seem to have taken a “hands off” approach to medical malpractice (even though it kills 100,000 people a year), going so far as to enact “tort reform” [...]