Law Commons^™

Medical Malpractice As Murder? Using Root Cause Analysis As A Guiding Framework For Criminal Medical Malpractice, Kinsey Novak Booth

West Virginia Law Review

Unprecedented criminal prosecutions for medical errors have increased throughout the nation: A Tennessee nurse was charged with reckless homicide for an isolated medication error; two South Carolina nurses were charged with criminal neglect for failing to change a wound dressing for just two days; and an Ohio pharmacist was charged with involuntary manslaughter for failing to detect that a solution contained too much sodium. Introducing criminal charges for cases of typical medical malpractice, which are most often the result of system failures, will dismantle hospitals’ error-reporting systems and lead to long-term catastrophic results for patient safety. This Note applies system …

Systemic Failures In Health Care Oversight, Julie L. Campbell

Georgia Law Review

Hospitals are intentionally shirking their duty to identify and report incompetent medical practitioners, and it is causing catastrophic injuries to patients. Why are hospitals doing this? Two decades of health care reforms have changed the way physicians and hospitals interact in the U.S. health care system, and as a result, the traditional health care oversight tools no longer work to ensure physician competence. With three out of four physicians now employees of hospitals or health care systems, hospitals have become the guardians of both the internal and external warning systems designed to flag incompetent practitioners. As the guardians, hospitals are …

Why Medical Error Is Killing You (And Everyone Else), Phoebe Jean-Pierre

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In 2000, the infamous report To Err is Human rocked society with its focus on the pervasive danger of medical error. More than two decades later, medical error rates remain high and pose a consistent danger to patients. Today, medical error ranks as the fourth leading cause of death behind heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19. Medical error reflects the vulnerabilities of the healthcare process and may be diagnostic in nature. A large concern in responding to medical error is an overemphasis on blame and the idea that good physicians do not make mistakes. Our perspective on how to address medical …

Taiwan's Medical Injury Law In Action, Chih-Ming Liang, Robert B Leflar, Chih-Cheng Wu

Emory International Law Review

Taiwan’s healthcare system, lauded internationally for its universal insurance coverage, moderate costs, and high quality of care, has one significant group of detractors: its physicians. Overworked, squeezed financially by the nation’s global budgeting system’s annual payment restrictions, and oppressed by both criminal prosecutions and civil malpractice actions, doctors and hospitals raised criticisms that culminated in legislative reforms enacted in 2017 and 2022. Are the reforms making any difference?

This Article offers the first comprehensive examination in English of how Taiwan’s medical injury law works. The Article is based on interviews with judges, attorneys, physicians, scholars, and other citizens, literature reviews, …

The Patient's Voice: Legal Implications Of Patient-Reported Outcome Measures, Sharona Hoffman, Andy Podgurski

Faculty Publications

In recent years, the medical community has paid increasing attention to patients' own assessments of their health status. Even regulatory agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, are now interested in patient self-reports. The legal implications of this shift, however, have received little attention. This Article begins to fill that gap. It introduces to the legal literature a discussion that has been ongoing in the health care field.

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are reports of patients’ symptoms, treatment outcomes, and health status that are documented directly by patients, typically through electronic …

How Covid-19 Put The Spotlight On The Emtala, Ikra Kafayat

Touro Law Review

There was a time when those that were unable to afford medical care risked being denied treatment in emergency situations. Before Congress passed Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA), patients were being transferred to different hospitals, without being screened, because they did not have insurance and could not afford the treatment. Hospitals are no longer allowed to transport patients without properly screening and stabilizing them. Patients can bring a suit against a hospital if they believe the hospital violated EMTALA, however, in certain circuits the patient will need to prove that hospital had an “improper motive” for failing to …

Patient Decision Aids Improve Patient Safety And Reduce Medical Liability Risk, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Tort-based doctrines of informed consent have utterly failed to assure that patients understand the risks, benefits, and alternatives to the healthcare they receive. Fifty years of experience with the doctrine of informed consent have shown it to be an abject catastrophe. Most patients lack an even minimal understanding of their treatment options. But there is hope. Substantial evidence shows that patient decision aids (PDAs) and shared decision making can bridge the gap between the theory and practice of informed consent. These evidence-based educational tools empower patients to make decisions with significantly more knowledge and less decisional conflict than clinician-patient discussions …

Unlimited Medical Liability?, Jessica L. Roberts, Leah R. Fowler, Paul S. Appelbaum

Emory Law Journal Online

No abstract provided.

Fighting The Ftca: Medical Malpractice, Veterans, And The Va, Taylor C. Spillers

Arkansas Law Review

Dr. Levy, who served as the Chief of Pathology at the Fayetteville Veterans Health Care System of the Ozarks (“Fayetteville VA”) from 2005 to 2018, diagnosed veterans with an error rate of 10%. The “pathology practice average is 0.7%.” Of the more than 3,000 cases Dr. Levy misdiagnosed, 589 were classified as “Level 3 (major) errors” which should always “trigger an [internal] investigation.” Unfortunately, no investigations ensued until Dr. Levy’s ultimate arrest, although the Fayetteville VA addressed Dr. Levy’s behavior repeatedly throughout his employment.

Strategic Apologies In Medical Malpractice Mediation, Brittany Norman

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

Mistakes happen, even in a field as serious and careful as medicine. As a result, some patients are left with unexpected results from their medical procedures. Once hospitals inform patients of medical mistakes or the patients inform the hospital, the patients' cases are moved to the legal realm, where they are viewed as a liability. This shift causes the patient to feel as though the hospital does not recognize him or her and prevents doctors from apologizing to their patients, despite their desire to do so. In an attempt to apologize without vulnerability to liability, medical professionals are sometimes instructed …

Telemedicine And Malpractice: Creating Uniformity At The National Level, Tyler D. Wolf

William & Mary Law Review

Picture this: an elderly gentleman living alone, isolated in a rural, midwestern locale. One day, this elderly gentleman awakes to find a distinct rash forming on his chest. The nearest doctor capable of performing an examination is located over a hundred miles away, and this man has not driven more than ten miles in twenty years. Shambling into his living room, the elderly man logs onto his computer and begins typing. Within twenty minutes he is videoconferencing with a doctor who examines the rash remotely and makes a diagnosis.

Through advances in telemedicine, the scenario described above is becoming an …

The Paradoxes Of Defensive Medicine, Michael J. Saks, Stephan Landsman

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

For decades, “defensive medicine” has been the leading argument driving reforms of medical malpractice laws throughout the United States. Defensive medicine is the presumed practice of administering excessive tests and treatments as a stratagem for reducing healthcare providers’ risk of malpractice liability, despite the absence of any expected benefit for the patient. The practice is widely believed to exist throughout American healthcare as a response to fears of malpractice litigation, and thought to be enormously wasteful of healthcare dollars. In consequence, it has become a justification for law reforms insulating the healthcare industry from tort liability. These claims are promoted …

How Liability Insurers Protect Patients And Improve Safety, Tom Baker, Charles Silver

All Faculty Scholarship

Forty years after the publication of the first systematic study of adverse medical events, there is greater access to information about adverse medical events and increasingly widespread acceptance of the view that patient safety requires more than vigilance by well-intentioned medical professionals. In this essay, we describe some of the ways that medical liability insurance organizations contributed to this transformation, and we catalog the roles that those organizations play in promoting patient safety today. Whether liability insurance in fact discourages providers from improving safety or encourages them to protect patients from avoidable harms is an empirical question that a survey …

Healthism In Tort Law, Elizabeth Weeks

Scholarly Works

This article draws on the author's recently published book, Healthism: Health Status Discrimination and the Law (with Jessica L. Roberts) (Cambridge University Press 2018), examining tort law doctrine and policy for examples of differential treatment of health status or behaviors. Just as scholars previously have drawn attention to discrimination based on race, sex, age, and other protected categories in tort law, the article urges similar examination of tort law's potential to discriminate against the unhealthy. The article discusses the potential for healthism in the reasonably prudent person standard of care, contributory negligence, assumption of the risk, noneconomic damages caps, impaired …

Informing Consent: Medical Malpractice And The Criminalization Of Pregnancy, Laura Beth Cohen

Michigan Law Review

Since the early 1990s, jurisdictions around the country have been using civil child abuse laws to penalize women for using illicit drugs during their pregnancies. Using civil child abuse laws in this way infringes on pregnant women’s civil rights and deters them from seeking prenatal care. Child Protective Services agencies are key players in this system. Women often become entangled with the Child Protective Services system through their health care providers. Providers will drug test pregnant women without first alerting them to the potential negative consequences stemming from a positive drug test. Doing so is a breach of these providers’ …

The Net Effects Of Medical Malpractice Tort Reform On Health Insurance Losses, W. Kip Viscusi, Patricia H. Born, J. Bradley Karl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this paper, we examine the influence of medical malpractice tort reform on the level of private health insurance company losses incurred. We employ a natural experiment framework centered on a series of tort reform measures enacted in Texas in 2003 that drastically altered the medical malpractice environment in the state. The results of a difference-in-differences analysis using a variety of comparison states, as well as a difference-in-difference-in-differences analysis, indicate that ameliorating medical malpractice risk has little effect on health insurance losses incurred by private health insurers.

Tipping The Scales?: Maine Adopts The Continuing Negligent Treatment Doctrine In Baker V. Farrand, Michael P. Beers

Maine Law Review

In Baker v. Farrand, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, held that for a series of related negligent acts or omissions committed by a health care provider or practitioner, a single cause of action “accrues” under the Maine Health Security Act (hereinafter MHSA) on the date of the last act or omission that contributed to the plaintiff’s injury. Hence, in situations where a physician provides continuing negligent treatment to a patient in which each and every one of the physician’s actions are negligent, the MHSA’s three-year statute of limitations does not begin to run until the …

Medical Malpractice And The Mind-Blowing Hypocrisy Of Obamacare Repeal, Joanne Doroshow

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Toward An International Constitution Of Patient Rights, Alison Poklaski

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In the past decade, medical tourism-the travel of patients across borders to receive medical treatment-has undergone unprecedented growth, fueled by the globalization of health care and related industries. While medical tourism can benefit patients through increased access to treatment and cost-savings, medical travel also raises concerns about ensuring quality of care and legal redress in medical malpractice. Moreover, existing regulations fail to address these unprecedented issues. The multilateral adoption of an International Constitution of Patient Rights (ICPR) is necessary in order to more effectively preserve medical tourism's benefits and guard against its risks.

The Relationship Between The Markets For Health Insurance And Medical Malpractice Insurance, W. Kip Viscusi, J. Bradley Karl, Patricia H. Born

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article evaluates the interdependence of medical malpractice insurance markets and health insurance markets. Prior research has addressed the performance of these markets, individually, without specifically quantifying the extent to which they are linked. Increasing levels of health insurance losses could increase the scale of potential malpractice claims, boosting medical malpractice losses, or could embody an improvement in medical care quality, which will reduce malpractice losses. Our results for a state panel data set from 2002 to 2009 demonstrate that health insurance losses are negatively related to medical malpractice insurance losses. An additional dollar of health insurance losses is associated …

The Treatment For Malpractice – Physician, Enhance Thyself: The Impact Of Neuroenhancements For Medical Malpractice, Harvey L. Fiser

Pace Law Review

This article will introduce some of the issues and offer some possible guidelines which may eventually guide cases of medical malpractice and medical care in the face of neurointerventions. First, I will briefly address the standard of care in medical malpractice cases in general. Second, I will discuss some of the existing and potential physical and neurological enhancements available for physicians. Finally, I will explore how these neurointerventions could alter the standards for medical malpractice for both the enhanced doctors and the entire medical profession.

The Effect Of Pegram V. Herdrich On Hmo Liability, Dawn Marie Kelly

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Affordable Care Act Is Not Tort Reform, Andrew F. Popper

Catholic University Law Review

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Prior to the enactment of the PPACA, Congress held several hearings focused on subrogation and relaxation of collateral source restrictions as well as caps on damages in an effort to promote tort reform. While the ACA included provisions on medical liability reform, the suggested tort reform was thwarted, and the ACA had no actual legal effect on limiting medical malpractice liability. This article argues that the reality is that the PPACA has done nothing to change the admissibility of collateral sources nor has it enhanced …

Abortion, Informed Consent, And Regulatory Spillover, Katherine A. Shaw, Alex Stein

Indiana Law Journal

The constitutional law of abortion stands on the untenable assumption that any state’s abortion regulations impact citizens of that state alone. On this understand-ing, the state’s boundaries demarcate the terrain on which women’s right to abortion clashes with state power to regulate that right.

This Article uncovers a previously unnoticed horizontal dimension of abortion regulation: the medical-malpractice penalties imposed upon doctors for failing to inform patients about abortion risks; the states’ power to define those risks, along with doctors’ informed-consent obligations and penalties; and, critically, the possi-bility that such standards might cross state lines. Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other …

The Treatment For Malpractice – Physician, Enhance Thyself: The Impact Of Neuroenhancements For Medical Malpractice, Harvey L. Fiser

Harvey L. Fiser

Coming to a hospital near you, the medically enhanced doctor - a doctor who thinks faster, is better with short and long term memory, is calmer during surgery, can work double shifts with little cognitive fatigue, and one day may have the memories of years of experience without actually having had them. With the expanded use of cognitive enhancing pharmaceuticals such as Adderall, Provigil, and more on the way, we are already seeing changes in education and the corporate world. From reaching a “normal” status for a person with an ADHD diagnosis to creating the “supernormal” employee with cognitive enhancers, …

The Treatment For Malpractice – Physician, Enhance Thyself: The Impact Of Neuroenhancements For Medical Malpractice, Harvey L. Fiser

Harvey L. Fiser

No abstract provided.

Congress Takes A Look At A No-Fault Proposal For Medical Malpractice: Some Observations, David E. Beitzel

Akron Law Review

EVEN A CURSORY GLANCE at the news media in the recent past indicates that problems in the area of medical malpractice are rising to turbulent heights. For example, newspapers are increasingly printing long and passionate letters-to-the-editor dispraising numerous circumstances and individual types, which are allegedly the cause of the problem. The primary development, which caused the initiation of this storm, is the rising premium rate for medical malpractice insurance.' The pinch on the physician's pocketbook has resulted in outcries of frustration and anger from the medical community. Objects of these attacks have included the insurance industry, the legal profession, and …

Wrongful Life, Turpin V. Sortini, Janet A. Laufer

Akron Law Review

In the past fifteen years, several state appellate courts have considered wrongful birth and wrongful life causes of action. While the modern trend is to allow wrongful birth causes of action, few courts have permitted wrongful life actions to be maintained. On May 3, 1982, the California Supreme Court, in Turpin v. Sortini became the first state high court to allow a wrongful life cause of action. This casenote will examine the reasoning of the Turpin court in allowing the wrongful life claim. While Turpin appears to signal a new trend in this area of tort law, there is little …

Ohio's Statute Of Limitations, Baird V. Loeffler, Amy L. O'Neil

Akron Law Review

The decision in Baird v. Loeffler is another victory for physicians and medical malpractice insurers. It will not be well accepted by plaintiff's attorneys or by others who advocate the rights of patients, especially minors, to be compensated for injuries sustained by them due to a physician's negligence. The case focuses on an amendment to the Ohio Medical Malpractice Statute which became effective July 28, 1975. The issue in Baird is the proper statutory construction that should be given to the statute where a minor's cause of action arose prior to the effective date of the statute. In effect, the …

The Unconstitutionality Of Ohio's Medical Malpractice Statute Of Limitations: Minors And Equal Protection, Eric A. Brandt

Akron Law Review

As with all laws, statutes of limitations must apply equally to all persons unless reasonable grounds permit the legislating body to make distinctions between classes of persons affected by the law. Laws that operate unequally, unfairly and unreasonably when applied to the public are unconstitutional. The Ohio Supreme Court addressed was the constitutionality of an Ohio medical malpractice statute of limitations in Schwan v. Riverside Methodist Hospital.