Illinois Supreme Court struck down their $500,000.00 cap on non-economic damages. I'll be writing more about Lebron v. Gottlieb Memorial Hospital tomorrow. But this is a big win for Plaintiffs.
Medical malpractice can happen in almost any medical context because there is often a lot at stake in treating a patient. There are grave consequences to many physician errors. Doctors can prescribe the wrong medication for a relatively insignificant illness and cause life altering or fatal consequences. In fairness, there are few professions where the consequences of errors are so meaningful. Most jobs are far more forgiving of mistakes. But many mistakes on the human body cannot be easily undone.
Breast Cancer: Failure to diagnose breast cancer is a common malpractice claim. Often, a missed breast cancer diagnosis claim is against a radiologist who misreads a mammogram. While it is true that good doctors can make mistakes, the reality is there are a minority of radiologists who are not very good at reading a mammogram and fail to see the severity of the breast lump is ignored as benign or underestimated.
Lung Cancer: Failure to diagnose lung cancer is also a common claim malpractice lawyers see. Like every cancer but maybe particularly in lung cancer cases, it is important to diagnose lung cancer early and misdiagnosis leads to delayed detection which makes treatment down road that much more difficult. It seems the most common problem doctors have in diagnosing lung cancer is not ordering the appropriate follow-up tests, particularly for nonsmokers who you would not expect to be at risk.
Colon/Rectal Cancer: Early diagnosis of colon and rectal cancer are key not only to survival rates but also to how invasive the treatment will be. The difference in surgical options with colon cancer, for example, may mean the difference between invasive laparoscopic surgery and an open abdominal procedure. Often, these cancers are misdiagnosed as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) or some other aliment.
Infection: Many hospital infections are not caused by hospital malpractice. Even when hospital malpractice is the cause, it is hard to prove. Many infection malpractice lawsuits come a hospital's failure to properly diagnose and/or treat the patient after the symptoms of infection were evident.
Aortic dissection: The classic sign of an aortic dissections are a tearing sensation in his or her chest. But it is not the only symptom and aortic dissections are often dismissed as heartburn.
Heart Attacks: There are a million heart attacks in the country every year, many of which are misdiagnosed by medical providers because the symptoms are not classic. Like non-smokers in lung cancer cases, patients that are otherwise not at high risk are often overlooked in spite of the fact that there symptoms are consistent with a heart attack. What often leads to an incorrect diagnosis is that doctors ignore the symptoms because they are focused on the patient's patient's age, sex, weight and medical history. Doctors sometimes rush out of the ER or exam room patients who are short of breath, telling them then need to workout when the patient is actually suffering from heart disease that needs immediate treatment.
Appendicitis: These cases fall into a common pattern. The symptoms are ignored, usually by primary care doctors or doctors in the emergency room which causes the appendix to rupture, spilling bacteria-ridden intestinal contents into the stomach, causing peritonitis or septicemia. Appendicitis is often misdiagnosed because there are other possible causes of stomach pain.
Nashville Public Radio (via TortsProf) reports that number of medical malpractice lawsuits in Tennessee has dropped 60% after implementation of new certificate of merit requirements in Tennessee, requiring certification of a contention that is difficult to dispute.
The article quotes a Tennessee state senator named Mark Norris who loves the new law. What does Mr. Norris do? He's a (defense) medical malpractice lawyer. He claims that medical malpractice rates raise for doctors every time a malpractice lawsuit is filed.
Is this true? Why would this be true? Let's say a lawyer files a malpractice case to preserve limitations and never serves the complaint. His malpractice insurer is going to raise his rates as a result? Why, in this case, would we blame malpractice lawyers for the rates going up? Wouldn't the doctor's beef be with his own insane medical malpractice carrier? If they think so many suits are frivolous, why would the mere filing of a claim be a mark on the doctor's record?
Norris also says a drop in premiums for doctors could mean lower billing rates for patients down the line. Hold your breath.
What astounds me is that neither Norris or the author pointed out that lawyers rushed to file before the new law took effect which complete inflates the data. I don't know how the author researched this story and talked to Norris and this fact still never came out. (I learned this from a comment to the TortProf post.)
All of that said, I really don't disagree with the most fundamental premise of the new Tennessee law requiring a doctor to certify before a lawsuit if filed that there is malpractice and resulting injury in the case.
The North Carolina Medical Board has launched a website to help patients determine whether doctors who have been found liable for medical malpractice for more than $25,000 or have been convicted of a felony.
I wrote about about this issue last year.
You can find the website here.
And, yes, absolutely, the same should be done for personal injury lawyers in North Carolina and elsewhere around the country.
The same doctor gets sued for the same injury in Huntington, West Virginia. Two Plaintiff allege medical malpractice against the same obstetrician and gynecologist for separate acts of negligence within the same month in 2007.
Frequent flyer doctors make up an obscene percentage of the medical malpractice payouts in this country.
An Illinois jury awarded $22.3 million to the parents of a boy whose leg was amputated soon after birth at a Chicago area hospital. According to the medical malpractice lawsuit against the hosptial, the injury was caused by the hospital's doctors failing to meet the standard of care in treating a congenital heart problem that required a shunt procedure. In addition to the loss of his leg, the boy suffers from cognitive deficiencies and developmental delays.
The Cerebral Palsy Birth Injury Lawyer Blog has a post today about how cerebral palsy is being treated with stem cell research. How incredible it would be if there was a cure down the road? Some much has changed in so many areas of medicine over the last 10 years. Maybe putting a major dent or even eradicating the effects of cerebral palsy will one day be possible....
The FDA is now looking to make inroads to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries caused by drug dosage errors, according to the Los Angeles Times. The FDA plan - called the Safe Use Initiative - looks to identify drugs and medical situations that commonly result in misuse of medication.
Is this a good idea? Well, 1.5 million people every year are victims of medication errors, according to a 2006 report by the Institute of Medicine.
Rhode Island health officials have ordered the Rhode Island Hospital, the state's largest hospital, to pay $150,000 and install video monitoring equipment in every operating room after the fifth - three of which were brain surgeries - wrong-site surgery incident since 2007. These are just the ones that we know about.
The Rhode Island Hospital has been fined in the past for wrong-site surgeries. But fines, and I'm sure lawsuits, do not seem to be making much of a change in behavior.
Boston Medical Center has reached a settlement of $900,000 with the family of an 86-year-old woman who died after falling in an operating room following hip surgery. The family's lawyer alleged in a lawsuit that the hospital staff did not take the appropriate precautions when the woman was put in her hospital bed. One driving force for settlement: a Massachusetts state inspection found that deficiencies in procedure contributed to the death.
A Saratoga County, Washington jury awarded $43.5 million last week to a woman who sued the former Bellevue Maternity Hospital in Niskayuna for severe brain damage she suffered during her birth in 1984.
While the Plaintiff is blessed with above-average intelligence with a degree from Arizona State University, she uses a wheelchair and lacks motor skills due to the brain damage from cerebral palsy.
How does a cerebral palsy case with such tremendous upside go to trial? Defendant's cerebral palsy lawyer reportedly turned down a high/low of $2 million/$300,000. Usually, cerebral palsy cases go to trial because one side miscalculates, which appears to be the case by the hospital in this case.
You can read more about this case here.
Maryland and Georgia both have rulings on tap from their high courts on caps on economic damages. Georgia got the ball rolling yesterday when the Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday on whether its cap on damages for medical malpractice claims is constitutional. A Georgia medical malpractice lawyer argued for the Plaintiff that the tort reform law in 2005 is unconstitutional because it grants unfair preferences and exemptions to hospital emergency departments.
Plaintiffs have a real shot in this case. The Georgia high court has previously stuck down laws that gave special exemptions to asbestos manufacturers facing property claims. Stay tuned....
A Florida jury has ordered two Coral Springs doctors to pay $4.3 million to the family of a girl who was misdiagnosed at birth in 1994. The jury determined that two doctors failed to perform tests required by the standard of care and failed to act on symptoms that showed the child had enterovirus, a usually mild illness that can cause death or serious injury in infants. This misdiagnosis left the girl with severe vision problems and permanent liver cirrhosis.
Summary of Michigan malpractice law.
Perhaps President Obama's speech gave to much hope to tort reform advocates thinking his mind was open to medical malpractice caps. President Obama said on 60 Minutes on Sunday that there was no evidence that malpractice caps would make a meaningful difference in the costs of health care.
"What I would be willing to do is to consider any ideas out there that would actually work in terms of reducing costs, improving the quality of patient care. So far the evidence I've seen is that caps will not do that."
But President Obama chooses his words very carefully. "So far the evidence" is the "I don't want to lose the left but I have to keep every option open because Fox News keeps telling me my presidency rides on health care" qualifier that underscores the point I made on the night of the speech: President Obama is keep his options open on health care tort reform.
Medical malpractice lawyers - particularly malpractice lawyers in states like Maryland and Texas that have seen the impact of medical malpractice caps on their clients ability to get a recovery are parsing every word of president Obama on tort reform.
Doctors at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center committed medical malpractice when caring for a baby with meningitis, a Los Angeles jury found on Friday, causing the child a permanent brain injury. The jury awarded $7.3 million in damages. The award will be used to pay for past and future medical care, the medical malpractice attorneys for the child told the Associated Press.
Settlement for $1.8 million was reached in a medical malpractice lawsuit where the jury this June awarded $4 million against an emergency room doctor. While that sounds like a major compromise, there is a cap on medical malpractice awards in Virginia, so the actual verdict after the cap was $1.8 million.
Plaintiff's Virginia medical malpractice lawyers alleged that a doctor misdiagnosed their 25-year-old client's heart condition. Plaintiff's condition was eventually diagnosed by doctors at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore.
This case had complications in discovery because of a problem I have discussed before: one lawyer representing all of the doctors (you can find the details in this article on the case). Defense medical malpractice lawyers love when doctors lock hands and sing "all for one, one for all." The problem is that this invariably leads to conflicts when the doctors could very easily point at each other.
There is a suggestion that malpractice lawyers in Tennessee for a woman and her four year old daughter told the woman not to pursue custody of the child because it could impact her medical malpractice lawsuit.
Interesting allegation that made by the Associated Press in exactly 123 words. This article raises a serious issue but the AP really seems to give it no mind.
