Study: Office liposuction has low malpractice risk
In a contrast to recent research suggesting office-based cosmetic surgery poses a high risk of liability, researchers at a recent medical meeting conclude that office-based liposuction is significantly safer than liposuction in a hospital.
The report is from William Coleman III, MD, clinical professor of dermatology at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, and William Hanke, MD, clinical professor at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. They reported on their research at the recent meeting of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery in Schaumberg, IL, and they tell Healthcare Risk Management it appears office-based procedures are not as risky as some believe.
Several state medical boards are reviewing what types of procedures are appropriate for office-based cosmetic surgery, spurred by recent criticism regarding the rate of complications and deaths. That criticism also prompted Coleman and Hanke to study the issue. They obtained data on malpractice legal claims for liposuction surgery procedures between January 1995 and December 1997, analyzing the data and combining it with data obtained from several professional plastic surgery organizations.
They determined 71% of the claims involved hospital liposuction and 21% involved office liposuction, even though the procedures were performed about evenly between the two settings. Data also indicated plastic surgeons were more likely than dermatologists to be sued for malpractice. U.S. plastic surgeons perform about 150,000 liposuctions annually, and dermatologists perform about 100,000, but the malpractice claims experience for plastic surgeons in the study was 113 times as large as that of the dermatologists.
Coleman says the explanation may lie in the differing practice styles of the two groups. Dermatol ogists tend to perform smaller-volume liposuction with local anesthesia, he says, whereas plastic surgeons tend to perform larger-volume, tumescent liposuction with general anesthesia. That also may explain the difference in malpractice experience of office and hospital procedures.
"Regardless of the location, if a physician adopts a more aggressive approach, the patient is at increased risk," Coleman says.
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