Articles Tagged With: Malpractice
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Legal Exposure if Patient Is Not Reassessed in ED Waiting Room
An attorney offers some recommendations for emergency physicians concerned about liability when patients are not reassessed in waiting rooms.
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Some ED Malpractice Lawsuits Hinge on Security Camera Footage
Security footage of ED waiting rooms is relevant to claims alleging delayed triage, failure to re-assess the patient during a long wait, or failure to intervene if a patient deteriorated in the waiting room. However, many claims involve allegations of delayed treatment or diagnosis. What happened in the waiting room, before the patient was brought back for evaluation, could have contributed to a poor outcome.
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Catastrophic Birth Injury Results in $7.75 Million Award and Insurance Litigation
This case provides lessons concerning aspects of malpractice litigation that do not focus on challenging the actions of the care providers. Just as providers owe duties to their patients, insurance providers have their own set of duties and obligations that are owed to their insureds. A failure to abide by those duties may subject the insurer to liability from their insured, as resulted in this case.
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Misdiagnosis Leads to Premature Emergency Delivery, Severe Brain Damage, and $34 Million Verdict
Misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis is one of the most — if not the most — common causes of medical malpractice claims. A failure to timely diagnose a condition may render the subsequent treatment ineffective or may preclude any treatment.
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Does a Clinical Decision Aid Constitute the Legal Standard of Care?
Each emergency physician should undertake the appropriate medical approach to evaluating a patient, regardless of any recommended course of action. The medical record should support using the recommended path or justify another course of action.
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Unified Defense Not Always Possible in Malpractice Claim
Defense counsel must be aware of competing interests in any case. Attorneys should engage in frank discussions with the hospital and any employed staff who are named defendants. There must be a cohesive strategy. Individual staff members named in lawsuits should not be speculating on whether a staffing shortage existed, or whether a staffing shortage caused or contributed to a patient’s alleged injury.
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Med/Mal Claims Focus on Decision Aid Findings from ECGs, Radiology Tests
If the radiologist does not address computer findings directly, the ED clinician is left to make assumptions about what the radiologist has found significant or insignificant. If radiologists are not routinely addressing computer findings, emergency providers will spend resources attempting to sift through reports and images, trying to rule in or out what the computer has found. Radiologists should acknowledge computer findings, and comment on why or why not the finding is accurate and significant to the patient’s care.
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Malpractice Lawsuits Allege ED Missed Intracranial Aneurysms
Failure to image patients is a relatively frequent cause of litigation, but it should be seen in context. It is not so much incorrect interpretations of imaging studies; rather, failure to consider the possibility of an aneurysm, resulting in an inadequate workup, is a more common allegation.
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Endotracheal Intubation Lawsuits Often Name ED Providers
After analyzing 214 relevant claims, researchers reported payments averaged $2.5 million. Intubation injuries occurred in the operating room most often, followed by the ED (16.3% of cases). Most cases involving the ED resulted in some type of payout (either a settlement or a jury award). Anesthesiologists were most likely to be named in the lawsuits (59.8%), and EPs were second most likely (19.2%) to be named. The vast majority of claims (89.2%) alleged permanent deficits, half the cases involved death, and 37.4% of the cases involved anoxic brain injury.
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EDs Can Mitigate Malpractice Perils of High-Risk Medications
Many emergency providers are hesitant to deprescribe medications taken by a patient they just met. Some are more open to the idea in certain cases, such as blood pressure medications associated with side effects or adverse outcomes. But if patients cannot identify the high-risk medications they are taking, or if the link between the medication and the chief complaint is weak, it makes the task harder.