A Study Of Defense Costs For Medical Malpractice Claims
April 7, 2012
An article appearing in The New England Journal of Medicine on April 5, 2012 analyzed 26,853 medical malpractice claims that were closed between 1995 and 2005 (“closed claims” include medical malpractice claims that resulted in an indemnity payment (a payment made to a medical malprac[...]
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Melanoma Rates For Young People Are Rising Rapidly
April 3, 2012
Cutaneous melanoma is the most serious and deadly form of skin cancer. Melanoma ranks as the fifth most common cancer in men and the seventh most common cancer in women. However, among young adults (18 to 39), melanoma is the second most common invasive cancer (breast cancer is number one). While[...]
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Autism Rates In U.S. Skyrocketed In Last 10 Years
March 31, 2012
What Is Autism? According to the National Institute of Mental Health, autism is a group of developmental brain disorders, collectively called autism spectrum disorder (ASD), that includes a wide range of symptoms that may result in mild impairment to severe disability. There are five pervasive d[...]
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Nursing Home Wandering And Elopement
March 23, 2012
Some residents of nursing homes have cognitive impairments such as Alzheimer’s disease that make them more prone to wandering or elopement, both of which can result in life-threatening injuries or even death. Wandering may be defined as straying into unsafe territories. Wandering may be eithe[...]
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Oregon Medical Malpractice Wrongful Birth Verdict
March 20, 2012
On March 9, 2012, an Oregon medical malpractice jury returned a verdict after a ten-day trial in the amount of almost $3 million in favor of the parents of a Down syndrome daughter that the 12-member jury determined would help cover the extra costs of caring for their daughter that the parents c[...]
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Are Metal Hip Replacements Safe?
March 15, 2012
The world’s largest artificial joint registry, the National Joint Registry of England and Wales, recommended this month that the use of metal-on-metal hip replacements be stopped, based on a study of the data involving more than 400,000 hip replacements between 2003 and 2011 that included d[...]
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The Impact Of Anesthesia Medical Malpractice On Practitioners
March 13, 2012
In an article published in the March, 2012 issue of the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, the results of a survey sent to 1,200 randomly selected members of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, of which 659 completed and returned the survey, found that 84% of the respondents had been [...]
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C. Difficile Infections
March 11, 2012
C. difficile (Clostridium difficile) infections remain one of the most serious and common healthcare-associated infections (“HAI”). In recent years, efforts in the U.S. to address and reduce HAIs in hospitals have met with some success, except for C. difficile infections. One reason f[...]
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We’re Celebrating One Full Year Of Daily Blog Postings!
March 4, 2012
Well, we have reached a significant milestone — one complete year of our daily blog postings (we started daily posting in our Blog on March 5, 2011 and have posted every day since). When we first started to blog, we thought that it might be difficult to find relevant, interesting informat[...]
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Poor People Sue For Medical Malpractice Less Than Others
March 2, 2012
It is a not-so-uncommon belief among doctors and other medical providers that the risk of being sued for medical malpractice by a poor patient is much greater than the risk of being sued for medical malpractice by other patients. This perception may help explain why, at least in part, some doctor[...]
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Hospital Acquired Infections
February 28, 2012
Nearly 4.5 hospital acquired infections occur for every 100 hospital admissions in the United States each year, costing the healthcare system between $5.7 billion and $6.8 billion per year (2007). Hospital acquired infections range from mild infections to life-threatening or life-ending infection[...]
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