Adverse Events, Stress, and Litigation: A Physician's Guide Review

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(More customer reviews)Adverse Events, Stress and Litigation: A Physician's Guide was recommended to me by my daughter in pre-med. As an emergency physician with 30 years of experience in healthcare, I found this book a welcome addition to my continuing medical education. The authors provide an in depth synopsis of a topic which is fraught with anxiety for all physicians, medical malpractice. The book's unique strength lies in both content and format, setting it apart from other literature on the same topic. What it is NOT, is a sterile, didactic review on medical litigation. Rather, it walks the reader through the mine field of a claim or suit. It shines a light through the fog that is the legal process (and the associated attorney jargon) inherent in this stressful situation. Further, it provides the reader with tools to successfully navigate the system. Real life examples are integrated throughout, adding interest and even comfort. Every physician and physician-to-be should include this in their mandatory reading. I was surprised to find hope and solace in a book that is thoroughly informative and relevant. I highly recommend it.

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What is it like to be sued for medical malpractice? Bad medical outcomes traumatize patients but they also traumatize physicians. The litigation that often follows is a profoundly human, rather than just a legal experience.Although every physician's case is different, this book shows how each case goes through the same judicial stages of complaint, discovery, depositions, motions, and delays that lead to trial, settlement, or being dropped.It also gives doctors an understanding of how lawyers think and work to help defendants.Written by a physician and a lawyer, the book provides unique insights - through real-life stories - into the personal experience of litigation as well as recommendations for dealing with each of the legal process.It also includes up-to-date reviews of HIPAA legislation, the controversial subject of disclosure, and recent developments in the law affecting medical practitioners.Only about thirty percent of plaintiffs win their cases against doctors, but the journey from bedside to witness stand tests both the personal character and the professional skills of those accused.This well-documented book will help doctors understand and navigate the legal system while honoring their own ideals and emerging changed but stronger from the experience.

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Belli for Your Malpractice Defense Review

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(More customer reviews)"What's black and brown and looks good on a lawyer?" If you've had to learn this "joke" the hard way, you'll be needing the following books:
Belli for Your Malpractice... (Hardcover) by Melvin M. Belli; Physician's Survival Guide (Paperback); Malpractice Depositions (Paperback) by Raymond M. Fish; Testifying in Court (ME050) (Hardcover) by Jack E. Horsley
Don't talk to anyone, outside your own councel, until you have read them all -- not the patient, not the patient's family, not the patient's lawyer, not your colleagues, not the mailman....
Although these are written for physicians who have been sued for medical malpractice, the information they contain can be adapted to most fields. I have recommended them to other friends outside of medicine who have asked advice on their own legal issues; and they have benefited from them as well. If you want to stop feeling like a hit-and-run-victim and start feeling like a doberman pincher (see joke above), get reading.

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Medical Malpractice Review

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(More customer reviews)A good book on a contentious topic. Written by an experienced health care economist and an attorney, the authors attempt to provide a broad perspective on medical malpractice. Sloan and Chepke agree that there are serious problems with medical malpractice, but not the problems generally discussed in most public forums. The intermittant public attention paid to this issue is driven often by intermittant malpractice 'crises' in which insurers withdraw from markets, premiums escalate sharply, and there is fear of consequent physician withdrawal from states with sharply rising premiums. A common popular perception of these crises is that they are driven by excessive tort litigation and awards. In fact, there is little evidence for this explanation and recurrent malpractice insurance crises apparently have their roots in other phenomena, notably cyclical features of the insurance industry. Another common public point of discussion is that malpractice litigation is a significant contributor to rising health care costs. The available evidence, however, suggests that malpractice torts have at best a modest effect on health care costs.
Where Sloan and Chepke see major problems with malpractice torts is their apparent failure to have an impact on the high rate of serious medical errors in the USA. In addition, the data cited by Sloan and Chepke indicates that the tort system does a poor and inefficient job of compensating individuals injured through negligence. Sloan and Chepke discuss the first generation of tort reforms which are mainly caps on awards. The major effects of these reforms has been indeed to reduce awards, claims, and insurance premiums with the primary beneficiaries being physicians and insurers. It appears that first generation reforms are a stereotypical example of successful interest group lobbying of state legislatures with modest general public benefits.
Much of the book is a systematic discussion of proposed reforms including such topics as alternative dispute resolution, specialized health courts, no-fault procedures, and a number of others. These discussions are generally thorough, contain nice summaries of the usually limited evidence, and discouraging in the sense that Sloan and Chepke demonstrate the uncertainties that any proposed reforms will work and point out the pragmatic political obstacles to most of these proposed reforms.
Sloan and Chepke conclude with a chapter proposing a series of modest reforms, particularly focused on making hospitals or hospital systems the focus on malpractice litigation in the hope that this will produce incentives to improve patient safety. This is reasonable and approaches like the one proposed are used by some academic hospital systems where physicians are employees.
Sloan and Chepke may make a couple of errors. As they point out, the tort system does a poor job of identifying and compensating meritorious claims. At the same time, a lot of claims pursued do lack merit. But this irrational element is one of the things that physicians most dislike about the present system. While the tort system may not be the 'lottery' claimed by many critics, its irrational enough to be worrisome to health care providers. There is also some recent evidence that some forms of torts do reduce medical errors. Nonetheless, Sloan and Chepke's analysis is convincing and their modest suggestions for reform quite reasonable.

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A comprehensive analysis of medical malpractice from legal, medical,economic, and insurance perspectives that considers why past efforts at reform havenot worked and offers recommendations for realistic, achievable policychanges.

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The Medical Malpractice Myth Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a model for what social science can do, in four ways.
First, it takes on an important topic--one that has generated incredible heat in the popular press and in political circles.
Second, it takes an entirely fair perspective. Old fashioned as it may seem, the author is actually interested in finding out the truth about the med mal problem.
Third, it surveys the available literature in the social sciences, reads and cogently digests every significant study, and assess the merits of each. The author is not an economist, but his understanding of economics and his sober and astute assessment of the quantitative AND qualitative evidence is terrific.
Finally, the book does all this with a clarity and cogency of writing that make it eminently readable. This is not a dull slog through endless tables and figures. While the empirical evidence is discussed, and there is even some attention paid to issues of methodological reliability and so on, the prose is lucid and no one interested in the topic will find it tough going in the least.
In fact, no one interested in the topic--from doctor to lawyer to politico--can afford not to read this book. If only more social science were this good, the world would be a better place.

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