A recent blog by a noted nurse-educator about the agonizing death of her grandmother illustrates the opportunity for multiple medical errors in today’s complex medical care system.
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.
Sometimes resolving a medical malpractice or other claim for damages arising from personal injuries is only half the battle. Often the injured person has significant medical expenses due to the negligence of the defendant, and usually the entity that paid for those medical bills wants to be repaid in whole or in part.
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.
The parents of a young child have filed a lawsuit against Swedish Medical Center, alleging that an employee doctor left a guidewire inside their boy after a routine procedure involving inserting a catheter in his leg to give him fluids and medication.
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.