All health care facilities are, or soon will be, required to maintain a patient’s medical records in electronic form. Almost all hospitals currently use EMR systems. Several U.S. companies are marketing and installing these systems. Using them has helped avoid some problems of hand-written charts, but also has created entirely new problems.
A recent article in a medical publication stated that malpractice insurance premiums for three representative specialties have gone down for the past two years, albeit by small amounts.
In the last several years, there has been a huge increase in the number of surgeries performed with robotic devices, usually manufactured by one company that has aggressively marketed them to doctors and hospitals.
Medical malpractice attorneys know that it is often very difficult to determine what went wrong in a surgical procedure. Unless someone witnessed exactly what happened and is willing to testify about it, or unless the outcome was so bad it is presumed to be the result of negligence (a res ipsa loquitur claim, such as leaving a surgical instrument in the patient), the reasons for a bad outcome are often never known to the patient or his/her attorney.
A recent article in a medical publication outlined the outrageous case of a Texas neurosurgeon who killed and maimed patients for several years while other doctors begged the Texas medical disciplinary body to take action to lift his license.
USA Today published an article on August 20, 2013, that described the failure of the nation’s state medical disciplinary systems to police doctors who repeatedly cause patient harm through negligence and error.
One thing that is constant in medical malpractice cases of all kinds is the need for expert testimony. Experts are required by the court rules when there is an issue that ordinary jurors do not have the experience or knowledge to judge.
When a patient undergoes a surgical procedure, an unexpected outcome can be a nerve or skin injury caused by improper positioning. The surgical team is responsible for ensuring that the patient is positioned in such a way that there is not excessive pressure on any particular part of the body and a nerve is not stretched to the point of injury.
It is not uncommon for a patient who undergoes surgery or any invasive procedure to develop an infection. Although operating rooms are meant to provide a sterile field for a surgery, there are many ways in which a bacterial organism can invade the body through an opening.
In modern hospitals the health care providers rely more and more on machines. A patient’s well-being is maintained through monitoring devices (picture the screen above the patient’s bed showing a pulse), breathing-assistance machines, and drug dispensing methods. The failure of any of these devices, or a malfunction, can adversely affect the patient’s well-being or even cause a death.
