Medical Malpractice | InjuryBoard Austin

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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Yesterday's Miami Herald had an article about a recent trend of American and Canadian citizens seeking medical care in foreign countries, particularly Cuba. The entire article was interesting, but this quote about potential medical malpractice stuck out:René Rodriguez, a Cuban-born physician now living in Miami, thinks Cuba would be a ''lousy place'' to have surgery. ``If anything happens to...

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Phillip Peters, a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law, has written a new article entitled The Fairness of Malpractice Settlements. Professor Peters looked at the correlation between settlements in medical malpractice claims and the strength of the underlying cases. He concluded:Researchers have studied the settlements that result from thisprocess and their findings...

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In one of the more unusual medical malpractice cases you'll hear about, a North Texas man has filed suit against several companies alleging that a bone implanted in his neck was stolen from a corpse. James Livingston, 44, of Weatherford, does not seek a specific monetary amount in his suit filed in New York last month against Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc. for fraud and negligence."How can...

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In medical malpractice news, WOAI has reported that the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services has continued to certify nurse aides even after the agency had previously blacklisted the nurses. The story reports:A newspaper investigation has found that nurse aides blacklisted by the state for complaints like abuse and stealing money from elderly patients continue to get certified work...

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It's not really medical malpractice news, but a Texas hospital, the Paris Regional Medical Center, has filed suit against an anonymous blogger who has been critical of the hospital's practices, including claims that the hospital "values the individual staff member or patient less than the buck" (an allegation that some personal injury lawyers think might be applicable to more hospitals than just...

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