Chicago Medical Malpractice Lawyer Blog

This is not news to practicing medical malpractice lawyers but it is to most citizens: malpractice verdicts are down in the last decade not up.

Malpractice payouts decline National study - From 1990 to 2005, the number of malpractice judgments and settlements drops 15.4% Thursday, January 11, 2007 JOE ROJAS-BURKE

For years, physician groups in Oregon and nationally have railed about a malpractice crisis said to be driving up costs and forcing doctors out of business.

But a study published Wednesday suggests that malpractice damage awards have declined substantially in recent years.

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen mined the federal government's National Practitioner Data Bank to track malpractice payments made on behalf of doctors from 1990 to 2005. Among the findings:

The average payment for a medical malpractice verdict, adjusted for inflation, dropped 8 percent.

The total number of malpractice judgments and settlements declined 15.4 percent.

The number of payments per 100,000 people declined more than 10 percent.

Public Citizen has stood with trial lawyers in opposing efforts by medical groups to limit awards for damages. The Washington, D.C.-based group asserts that lawmakers should focus on reducing medical errors and tightening doctor discipline and oversight.

As a medical malpractice lawyer I pour over medical records nearly everyday. The extraordinarily poor handwriting found in most of these records makes them difficult to read and understand. I have no doubt that many people have suffered malpractice as a result of poor and sloppy record keeping. The move to computers is long overdue

in medicine.

Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year.

To address the problem—and give the push for electronic medical records a shove—a coalition of health care companies and technology firms will launch a program Tuesday to enable all doctors in the U.S. to write electronic prescriptions for free. The National e-prescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) will offer doctors access to eRx Now, a Web-based tool that physicians can use to write prescriptions electronically, check for potentially harmful drug interactions and ensure that pharmacies provide appropriate medications and dosages. "Thousands of people are dying, and we've been talking about this problem for ages," says Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, a Chicago-based health care technology company, that initiated the project. "This is crazy. We have the technology today to prevent these error

Chicago and Illinois medical malpractice lawyers have known for a long time that the supposed malpractice crisis was a creation of the insurance industry to limit its risks. as further evidence of that fact a new study reveals that only a small number of doctors are responsible for the vast majority of claims.

Report questions U.S. 'malpractice crisis'

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- A small group of mistake-prone doctors is responsible for the belief the United States has a medical-malpractice lawsuit crisis, a watchdog report says.

Barely 5.9 percent of doctors were responsible for 57.8 percent of U.S. malpractice payments from 1991 to 2005, with each of these doctors making at least two payments, says "The Great Medical Malpractice Hoax," released by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen group.

The vast majority of doctors -- 82 percent -- have not had a medical malpractice payment in the period beginning in 1990, the report says.

Business and medical lobbying interests are misleading the public when they claim a malpractice crisis in their lobbying to limit how much money injured patients may seek in the courts, the report says.

American Medical Association board Chairman Cecil Wilson said the Nader group "based its conclusions on an inherently flawed database, the National Practitioner Data Bank," The Insurance Journal reported.

The databank, created by Congress, tracks doctors' malpractice payments and disciplinary actions taken against them by state medical boards or hospitals.

Wilson said the Government Accountability Office has raised concerns about the databank's integrity.

The GAO had no immediate comment.

In his recent report on the state of the federal judiciary Chief Justice Roberts reports that the low level of pay for our nation's judges has reached a "constitutional crisis." Much like congress, unless the pay disparity between judges and lawyers in the private sector is addressed only wealthy people will be able to afford to be judges. We need an independent judiciary not an independently wealthy judiciary.

Judicial Salaries at Top of Court Administrator's Agenda
In his annual report on the judiciary issued Jan. 1, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said the continued failure of Congress to raise judicial salaries had reached the level of a "constitutional crisis." The job of selling Congress on the urgency of pay raises will fall in part to James Duff, the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. From the Legal Times.