Medical Malpractice | InjuryBoard Austin

Some lobbyist groups would like to believe so, and they've filed a new suit to try and prove it. The case stems from a medical malpractice case in Corpus. There, a Corpus doctor was sued by one of his patients after the patient developed a severe infection after a surgery. In the suit, the patient asserted that the medical malpractice damage caps violated several provisions of the Texas...

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This weekend, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about a disturbing trend of mandatory arbitration agreements showing up in the medical malpractice context. The article states:Within the space of two weeks late last year, Michael and Hedy Cohen, who happen to be experts on medical errors, each encountered what they saw as a disturbing development in the modern doctor-patient relationship. They...

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The February 2, 2008 Kansas City Star reports on a study from the National Senior Citizens Law Center that finds that many nursing home agreements may be violating state and federal law. Eric Carlson, the study's author, said that some of the agreements conflict with the federal Nursing Home Reform Law and state laws. The federal law requires nursing homes to provide care that helps residents...

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Tomorrow, a medical malpractice trial is scheduled to start involving the death of actor John Ritter (the family has previously settled with the hospital involved). In the trial, the Ritter family is seeking an award of $67 million, an amount that the family claims Mr. Ritter would have earned for his continued acting on the show "8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter." The case is a...

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Today, there have been two recent blog posts on appalling cases of problems in nursing homes. First, Ed Normand has posted on a story of a nursing home patient who developed maggots in his eyes. Not to be outdone, Ray Mullman at the South Carolina Nursing Home Blog posts on a nursing home that hired a serial rapist as a nurse. Not surprisingly, the nurse ended up raping one of the residents. ...

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Earlier this week, the American College of Emergency Physicians issued their report card for the state of Texas. Overall, Texas received a "C," but the way we received the grade is interesting. Apparently, Texas is a haven for poor emergency room medical care. We received a "D" in public health and safety, a "D " in access to care, and a "D " in quality/patient safety. Then how did we...

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Yesterday, a group of Harvard doctors released a study that may have a bearing on medical malpractice cases. The study reveals that patients are now waiting longer in emergency rooms. The Wall Street Journal, which covered the study, wrote:The median wait for adults rose to about 30 minutes in 2004 -- meaning half waited more and half waited less -- from 22 minutes in 1997, a 36% increase,...

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Today's Washington Post reports that many of the nation's physician-owned hospitals were performing faulty medical care. The article reports on a Department of Health and Human Services study set to be released today. Among other things, the study found:55% of the 109 physician-owned hospitals reviewed had emergency "departments" - the majority of those had only one bedFewer than 1/3 of the...

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Last week, the West Virginia Supreme Court was faced with the question of whether the state's medical malpractice reforms (including damage caps and requirements of pre-suit expert reports) applied to a claim against a hospital for providing contaminated sutures. The court eventually found that the reforms applied. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Larry Starcher railed on the malpractice...

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As part of Texas' 2003 tort reform, the Texas Medical Board was given more resources and more powers to police doctors. Where "regulation" through medical malpractice cases decreased, the TMB was supposed to take up the slack to help keep Texans safe. And the TMB started going after doctors. So much so that physicians groups asked legislators to hold hearings on the new TMB enforcement. The...

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Medical malpractice cases are hard, and for the last several years big insurance companies and big businesses have spent millions of dollars to convince the American jurors that a medical malpractice crises exists. As a result, it has been harder for plaintiffs to win medical malpractice cases, and when plaintiffs do win, the damages have been lower. But I have some hope that is changing...

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A recent study finds that nearly half of US Doctors fail to report medical malpractice or unethical behavior, even though most agree that such conduct should be reported. From the article:Up to 96 percent of those surveyed said they should report all instances of significant incompetence or medical errors to the hospital clinic or to authorities. The exception was among cardiologists and...

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Yesterday, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services released, for the first time, a list of the worst nursing homes in America. According to CMS:Release of the list was prompted by the number of facilities that were consistently providing poor quality of care, yet were periodically instituting enough improvement that they would pass one survey only to fail the next (for many of the same...

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The recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine discusses the controversial issue of pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers of medical devices providing free gifts to physicians that prescribe their products. The article states that 94% of physicians have some type of relationship with the industry. The article best summarized the debate with the following quote:From a policy...

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Last Friday's New York Times Health Blog addressed the emotional toll felt by peoples that are the victims of medical malpractice. The entry, which discusses a new article and proposed documentary, states the following:The writers, Dr. Tom Delbanco and Dr. Sigall K. Bell of the Harvard Medical School, note that while the medical community has focused largely on reducing error rates, hospitals...

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