Only 1 in 5 malpractice claims against doctors leads to a settlement or other payout, according to the most comprehensive study of these claims in two decades. But while doctors and their insurers may be winning most of these challenges, that’s still a lot of fighting. Each year about 1 in 14 doctors is the target of a claim, and most physicians and virtually every surgeon will face at least one in their careers, according to the study published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Study: Only 1 in 5 malpractice suits pay is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Medical procedures and surgeries on the wrong patient and wrong body part have declined stantially at Veterans Affairs hospitals nationwide, while reports of close calls have increased, according to a study that credits ongoing quality improvement efforts, which encourage better reporting and communication at hospitals. The study, published online in the Archives of Surgery, is based on reports from mid-2006 to 2009; they were compared with data from the previous five years.

Fewer surgical errors at VA hospitals is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Accidental drug overdoses from prescription pills have more than doubled in the past decade as deaths from illegal drugs decreased, a , Florida study found. Prescription medications were implicated in 76 percent of all overdose deaths in Florida between 2003 and 2009, while illicit drugs such as cocaine and heroin were present in 34 percent of deaths, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Ten percent of overdoses came from a mix of both illegal and prescription drugs. Unintentional poisoning is the second leading cause of injury death in the U.S. after automobile accidents, accounting for 29,846 deaths nationwide in 2007, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report said.

Study: Prescription drug deaths increasing is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Three Austin doctors were among 75 disciplined this month by the Texas Medical Board, including Dr. James Edward Hansen, a neurologist, who surrendered his medical license after closing his practice.

The board’s order said Hansen suffered a spinal injury while biking and was unable to practice. It said the discipline is authorized when a doctor cannot practice skillfully and safely because of “mental or physical condition” and when the board is seeking to resolve a complaint or contested case against the doctor.

The board also ordered Dr. Dennis Barson Jr., a general practitioner, to take a course in patient boundary issues after allegedly providing false information about a court-ordered drug test for a close friend. The order said Barson did not admit guilt but signed the order to avoid litigation.

The board also ordered Dr. Lloyd Elvin Arnold Jr. to pay a $500 fine for allegedly closing his practice without giving proper notice to patients so they could get or transfer their records.

UPDATE:  I received a nasty letter from one of the doctor’s lawyers threatening a defamation lawsuit because of comments made by other people based on this article were allegedly untrue.  It’s definitely a shame some doctors and lawyers feel they can bully people who exercise their free speech rights.  While I definitely feel I can’t be held liable for someone else’s comments on this site – I’m too busy working on client files to deal with the hassle .  So I’ve removed all the comments.

Board disciplines three doctors is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

The Texas Medical Board was among 33 similar boards nationally that did not discipline many doctors who either lost their hospital privileges or were restricted in their hospital practices, a national report released Tuesday said.

“This is a serious failing on the part of state medical boards,” Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group and overseer of the study, said in an interview. Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader.

Hospitals report sanctions against doctors to the National Practitioner Data Bank, which the health research
group viewed over a 20-year period, from 1990 to 2009.

It found that state boards did not discipline 55 percent of the 10,672 physicians who had been listed in the national data bank, including 3,218 doctors who permanently lost their hospital practice privileges. The report said that in Texas, 60.4 percent of 725 doctors during the two decades escaped medical board action.

One unnamed doctor who did not receive discipline by the state board in Texas had 22 medical malpractice payments totaling $2.6 million between 1996 and 2008 that included claims that he operated on the wrong part of the body and injured three patients permanently, the report said.

“Either state medical boards are receiving this disturbing information from hospitals but not acting upon it, or much less likely, they are not receiving the information at all,” Wolfe said in a written statement. “Something is broken and needs to be fixed.”

Texas Medical Board spokeswoman Leigh Hopper said that under board rules, hospitals are required to tell the board when they discipline a doctor whose continued practice is a threat to the public welfare but that not all of them do.
Further, the national data bank does not notify the board of hospital disciplinary reports, and the board would have to look up individual doctors by name to see whether any were taken. That would not be practical with 49,397 instate doctors, Hopper said.

Not all doctors disciplined by a hospital merit board action, she added. A substance abuser, for example, might be referred to a confidential treatment program, with no public action taken.

Wolfe said that for a nominal fee, medical boards can pay the data bank to be notified of hospital actions against physicians in their state. Hopper said she was not aware of that service or the cost.

For $3.25 per doctor per year, the national data bank would provide notice of any actions against the doctor within 24 hours, data bank spokesman David Bowman said.

For Texas, that cost would be about $160,540 a year — an amount that Hopper said equals the salaries of four investigators at the agency.

Report: Texas not punishing enough doctors is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

About eight years ago, at the age of 78, a vascular surgeon in California operated on a woman who then developed a pulmonary embolism. The surgeon did not respond to urgent calls from the nurses, and the woman died.

Even after the hospital reported the doctor to the Medical Board of California, he continued to perform operations for four years until the board finally referred him for a competency assessment at the University of California, San Diego.

“We did a neuropsychological exam, and it was very abnormal,” said Dr. William Norcross, director of the physician assessment program there. “This surgeon had visual-spatial abnormalities, could not do fine motor movements, could not retain information, and his verbal IQ was much lower than you’d expect.”

Yet “no one knew he had a cognitive deficit, and he did not think he had a problem” Norcross continued. The surgeon was asked to surrender his medical license.

One-third of the nation’s physicians are older than 65, and that proportion is expected to rise. Many doctors, of course, retain their skills and sharpness of mind into their 70s and beyond. But physicians aren’t immune to dementia, Parkinson’s disease, strokes and other ills of aging. And some experts warn that there are too few safeguards for patients.

“My guess is that John Q. Public thinks there is some fail-safe mechanism to protect him from incompetent physicians,” Norcross said. “There is not.”

Often the mechanism does not kick in until a state medical board has found it necessary to discipline a physician. A 2005 study found that the rate of disciplinary action was 6.6 percent for doctors out of medical school 40 years, compared with 1.3 percent for those out only 10 years.

If you are injured by a doctor in Texas, it gets even worse because tort reform not only caps your damages, but, by deterring lawsuits, makes it harder for negligent doctors to be removed.

Aging doctors bring fears of incompetence is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Here’s another great article about tort reform myths which was written just after the 2003 tort reform legislation was passed.

Here’s an excerpt:

The purpose of Proposition 12′s severe restrictions on victims’ rights was to lower malpractice insurance premiums, which had seen double-digit increases. In Texas, as elsewhere, the tort reformers exploited the rate hikes as part of a scare campaign to sell reform. However, the facts show that the legal system is not driving insurance rates. Tort actions at the state level – meaning personal-injury lawsuits, everything from product liability to traffic accidents to libel have fallen 5 percent in nine years, according to the National Center for State Courts.

More specifically, malpractice filings declined nationally by about 4 percent between 1995 and 2000. And while a recent analysis of the Medicare population estimated that medical errors kill 131,000 people annually, making it the fourth leading cause of death, medical suits are only 5 percent of personal-injury filings, with product liability cases another 5 percent. Plaintiffs lose 60 percent of product cases and 70 percent of malpractice suits.

Not only are socially significant lawsuits like malpractice and product liability a small fraction of the legal picture but numerous studies show that capping damages doesn’t affect insuance premiums. One survey examined insurance rates between 1985 and 1998, then ranked the states according to the severity of their restrictions on lawsuits. Increased severity did not produce lower rates. In Texas, where malpractice filings dropped 20 percent in the nine years before Proposition 12, the liability picture has been little improved by its passage. About a third of doctors will see a decrease of 12 percent after cumulative increases of 147 percent. The rest will either get no relief or double-digit increases.

According to J. Robert Hunter, Federal Insurance Administrator under Presidents Ford and Carter, caps don’t work because liability rates reflect not litigation costs but the insurance industry’s own practices. During good times, insurers write policies even for the worst risks to generate cash for investment. When the stock market tanks, rates climb steeply to cover losses. The current liability crisis, Hunter notes, coincided with the market downturn that began in the summer of 2001. And since the insurance cycle is international, the “hard market” also drove up premiums in Canada, Australia and France. And those countries have totally different legal systems, Hunter says.

…

The numbers show that lawsuits are an insignificant cost both to businesses and to health providers, for whom they represent less than 2 percent of spending. In short, the lawsuit-abuse crisis is a hoax.

More Medical Malpractice Myths is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Here’s a great article about how tort reform is unlikely to cut health care costs.

Here’s some of the article:

The health economists and independent legal experts who study the issue, however, don’t believe that’s true. They say that malpractice liability costs are a small fraction of the spiraling costs of the U.S. health care system, and that the medical errors that malpractice liability tries to prevent are themselves a huge cost– both to the injured patients and to the health care system as a whole.

“It’s really just a distraction,” said Tom Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of “The Medical Malpractice Myth.” “If you were to eliminate medical malpractice liability, even forgetting the negative consequences that would have for safety, accountability, and responsiveness, maybe we’d be talking about 1.5 percent of health care costs. So we’re not talking about real money. It’s small relative to the out-of-control cost of health care.”

Insurance costs about $50-$60 billion a year, Baker estimates. As for what’s often called “defensive medicine,” “there’s really no good study that’s been able to put a number on that,” said Baker.

Contrary to Rick Perry’s claims, a recent analysis by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker found that while Texas tort reforms led to a cap on pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which led to a dramatic decline in lawsuits, McAllen, Texas is one of the most expensive health care markets in the country. In 2006, “Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per person enrolled in McAllen, he finds, which is almost twice the national average — although the average town resident earns only $12,000 a year. “Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.”

The Medical Malpractice Myth is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

The Texas Medical Board is pursuing legal action against a doctor who treated patients at a now-closed Austin clinic for autism and other disorders, citing patient care violations, negligence and failure to safeguard patients against potential complications.

The board is asking a state administrative judge to recommend a penalty against Dr. Jesus Caquias, who also has a private family medicine practice in Brownsville, after it could not agree with Caquias on a disciplinary action. An administrative law judge recommends penalties to the board, which has the final say.

Caquias was a doctor at CARE Clinics at 4201 Bee Cave Road, which was raided last year by IRS and FBI agents. Court documents say agents had probable cause to believe the clinic, owned by Kazuko Grace Curtin, could have been the site of fraud and other federal violations of federal law. Computers and records were seized so agents could examine insurance billing records, among other items.

The board’s March 31 complaint against Caquias alleges that he treated three patients at the clinic with intravenous chelation therapy — a controversial treatment that uses chemicals to sweep metals from the body — without documenting symptoms, assessments and monitoring.

The board’s complaint said Caquias also worked with a CARE Clinic that Curtin opened in Tampa, Fla., where prescriptions and medical orders went out under his signature without his permission on an autistic child, demonstrating “a lack of proper diligence in his professional practice.”

Caquias said that the patients’ complaints were drummed up by an out-of-state resident who got the patients’ names from an article on the clinics. The patients were happy with their care, he said: “I think it’s the suppression of alternative medicine.”

At a meeting this month, the board disciplined two other doctors in the Austin area.

The board ordered Dr. Kenneth Lee Armstrong, a family practice doctor in Round Rock, to take courses in physician-patient boundaries and treating psychiatric disorders. Armstrong phoned a patient repeatedly to suggest and arrange meetings outside his, office, the board said.

The board also fined Dr. Louis William Apostolakis, a plastic surgeon, $1,000 for selling a prescription bleaching cream in violation of a state law. Apostolakis said Texas is one of few states with such a prohibition.

“The law that exists in Texas is an ill-advised law that protects pharmacies at the expense of consumers,” ‘ Apostolakis said. “I will abide by said law but firmly disagree with the premise.”

Judge to suggest doctor’s penalty is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Three Austin doctors were among 70 physicians disciplined earlier this month by the Texas Medical Board, including two who are on board-imposed-probation and no longer practice medicine — but could again someday.

Dr. Daniel J. Di Bona was already serving a 10-year probation stemming from a substance abuse order and problems practicing because of side effects of medication and numerous medical problems, the board said. Di Bona voluntarily ended his internal medicine practice in March 2008 to safeguard the public, the order said.

The board said that Di Bona is on disability and that he requested a voluntary suspension “in lieu of further disciplinary proceedings” and to preserve other work options.

The suspension stays in force until he can demonstrate to the board that he can practice safely.

Di Bona’s current problems are medical, and “he hopes to regain his health and practice again,” said his lawyer, Michael Sharp of Austin.

The board issued a public reprimand and $1,000 fine to Dr. Emily Jane Sandbach, who practiced internal medicine but is teaching college-level biology. Sandbach was under a five-year probationary order in connection with an episode of depression in 2004, the board said. She failed to meet all of the terms of her probation, prompting the order.

Sandbach did not return a call left at her college office.

The board also ordered family practice doctor Richard John Wiseman to take’ a medical record-keeping course and pay a $1,000 fine for prescribing and dispensing a compounded thyroid hormone to a patient without proper labeling, record-keeping or a pharmacy license.

“This situation was simply an instance of providing patients easier access to specifically formulated compounded hormone medications, which are not readily available at most pharmacies,” Wiseman’s lawyer, Tony Cobos, said. “In the vast majority of states, physicians can in fact dispense medications from their office. Unfortunately, Texas is more restrictive in that regard, and Dr. Wiseman chose to resolve it (the board’s case) voluntarily rather than to expend fees and resources.”

Reprimand, fines for doctors disciplined by medical board is a post from: Accident & Injury Law in Texas