Illinois Medical Malpractice Blog

The Orange County Register reported that a sixty-one year old man won a $3.3 million jury award in a medical malpractice case against his primary care physician.

The victim initially saw the doctor in June 2002 after he had been urinating blood. The doctor concluded that the man had a kidney stone and instructed him to do nothing unless his symptoms resurfaced.

Only six months down the road, the victim was diagnosed with bladder cancer. After enduring multiple surgeries and several months of physical therapy, he continues to walk with a cane and has to urinate into a bag attached to his stomach.

For the full article.

A jury recently awarded the family of a 33 year-old man $5 million. The man bled to death while being transferred from one hospital to another. Due to state medical malpractice lawsuit caps, the man's family will get only $359,000 in noneconomic damages. The man entered the hospital with a broken leg after a car accident. He was soon transferred to a hospital 40 miles away. Before the transfer, a nurse noted in the 33 year-old's chart that he was “spurting blood." Additionally, a medical technician noted he was losing “copious amounts of blood.” Despite the warnings, that man was transferred in violation of Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 which requires emergency rooms to screen patients and prevent discharges and transfers of patients with serious medical conditions. In this man’s case, he went into cardiac arrest on the transfer and was later pronounced dead.

The man’s widow was awarded $5 million by a jury, however the 6th circuit reduced the award to $359,000 on appeal, due to that state's cap on noneconomic damages. This is a prime example of why tort reform is contrary to notions of fairness and justice. In this case a very young man with a full life ahead of him bled to death due to easily avoidable miscommunication and negligence of hospital staff and contrary to the established laws.

The large disparity in what the jury awarded the widow and what the law allowed the widow to recover demonstrates that there are two sides to the so-called "tort reform" debate. While doctors often complain of frivolous lawsuits, the fact remains that many cases are screened out of the system before a jury even has a chance to consider the facts. In fact, if a case goes to jury, only one-third of plaintiffs will prevail. On the other hand, in a case like this, the award allowed by applicable state law is grossly and unjustly lower than what a jury of peers believes the man’s estate is entitled to recover.

A jury is about to decide. Jurors are about to consider who is covered by the $200,000 damage cap in the state in a medical malpractice lawsuit. In the case up for the jury, a 45-year old man is alleging negligence and medical malpractice during a back surgery he underwent last year. The defendants are both the state Health & Science University and the OHSU Medical Group. The OHSU hospital is clearly covered by the cap which applies to hospitals. The jury will answer the question whether the OHSU Medical Group is an agent of the hospital and thus, also covered by the caps.

This medical malpractice lawsuit is the first to come to trial since the state Court of Appeals overruled the cap in another case earlier this month.

To read the full article.

An article reported that Our Lady of Lourdes Regional Medical Center had allowed one of its doctors to perform unnecessary heart procedures, such as angiograms, angioplasty, and stent replacements on their patients. The lawsuit against the Medical Center for defrauding public health care providers was filed by a whistleblower who had formerly worked with the doctor. The Federal Government has settled the lawsuit for $3.8 million and the whistleblower will receive $760,000 of the award. The doctor is also individually facing several criminal charges and hundreds of medical malpractice lawsuits for the unnecessary heart procedures.

For the full article.

In response to the study released earlier this month from the Archives of Internal Medicine concerning doctors’ disclosure preferences, an article from the Times examines whether doctors fearful of lawsuits and those practicing in tort reform states have the same disclosure preferences. The answer: yes.

Doctors in Canada for example, fear lawsuits significantly less than those in the United States due to paying less for malpractice insurance, cases being heard by judges, not juries and caps on damages for pain and suffering. However, these doctors are just as reluctant to fess up to their mistakes as those in states in the United States labeled as so-called medical malpractice “crisis” states.

For the full article.

In the past four years, the Justice Department has launched several investigations into relationships between physicians and medical device makers. The focus has been on potential conflicts of interest doctors may have in employing devices from companies they are receiving kickbacks from.

Healthcare attorneys say it’s only a matter of time before Hospitals become the subject of the same scrutiny. Regardless of the hospital’s knowledge of conflicts of interest between its staff and device sales companies, the hospitals are still on the hook.

For the full article.

During the 1990’s, due to rising medical costs, the median income of primary care physicians remained relatively flat. In response, many physicians organized their offices into corporate practices to save money by assigning more nurses and physician’s assistants to more technical tasks

Often, these practices are flawed because not all patients are able to see a doctor during their visits. Some physicians have their physicians assistants or nurse practitioners see the less serious patients which may result in a misdiagnosis. On a more extreme end, due to more volume in patient visits, doctors, particularly specialists may not have a chance to follow up with patients or patients’ primary care physicians.

For example, someone who was diagnosed with cancer may not receive the kind of immediate follow up and care given by smaller practices if sent to a corporate physician practice. This lag in time could be crucial to someone with cancer diagnosed at an early stage so that the cancer doesn’t metastasize or spread while the patient is waiting for a course of treatment.

For the full article.

After less than a day of deliberations, a New Orleans federal jury awarded a 62-year-old retired FBI agent $50 million in compensatory damages, and an additional $1 million in punitive damages. The man suffered a mild heart attack after taking Vioxx for almost three years.

For the full article.

Another Times article in a series of articles examining financial incentives for doctors in prescribing drugs and treatments and evaluating patients examines cardiologist recommendations of treatment for patients.

Typically, options for patients with blocked coronary arteries are drugs, bypass surgery and vessel-clearing procedures like angioplasty. Among these choices, angioplasty is the most profitable for the doctors. While no accusations have been made or charges filed, several areas have a rate of angioplasties that are off the charts. For example, a northern town Elyria, has angioplasties at a rate nearly four times the national average.

For the full article.

An article from Reader’s Digest suggests 7 tips for patients to critically examine their diagnosis, treatment and doctor’s advice. The most important of the tips: TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS! These tips were written by a surgeon who required hand surgery—a frightening surgery for someone who makes a living using his hands. Despite choosing one of the best hand surgeons in the world, she became a victim of bad medical advice, resulting in a recovery 18 months longer than originally expected. Here are her other tips:

2) Choose wisely. The doctor you pick is only the first member of a team of specialists involved in your care. She'll likely assemble the rest of the team, so finding the right doctor is doubly important. So, too, is the hospital you choose. There are no guarantees, but usually, the better the hospital, the better the team.

3) Read the label. Many lab mix-ups start in your doctor's office. When giving a blood or other specimen, ask the nurse, politely, to show you the identification sticker to make sure it's accurate.

4) Do it again. If a lab result is unexpected or alarming, your doctor may have you retested. If he doesn't, ask him about a do-over.

5) Carry a medical passport. A summary of your vital health information is a must. It should list diseases, medications and doses, food and drug allergies, and phone numbers of your physician and nearest relative. Take it with you to every doctor you see -- even the radiologist.

6) Be a pack rat. Keep copies of all lab reports, x-rays, MRIs and CT scans, plus names and addresses of your MDs.

7) Get a second opinion. It's crucial to your health. If a diagnosis requires surgery, chemotherapy or medications with side effects, find another specialist (call the hospital's referral service for help), and send him all your pathology and radiology lab work for review, both the images and reports. When you get the second opinion, make sure you understand it. If not, talk to the doctor until you do.

For the full article.

An August Reader’s Digest article examines mistakes made in the diagnosis of diseases and medical conditions in the lab.

An example of the horrifying impact a mistaken diagnosis can have is a 61-year-old Chicago woman who was diagnosed with intestinal cancer after a routine colonoscopy. The diagnosis was particularly frightening because the woman had fought intestinal cancer—and won—10 years earlier.

After a two foot portion of the woman’s small and large intestines were removed, the woman began experiencing pain and digestive troubles. Her immediate thought was that they hadn’t removed all of the cancer. When she visited her doctor during a six-week checkup, she received troubling news. She didn’t have cancer at all. She had been misdiagnosed when her tissue sample had been contaminated with another person’s cancerous cells. She had endured unnecessary surgery.

This story illustrates the different forms medical errors and medical malpractice can take. Misdiagnosis in labs is a serious problem, particularly when the diagnosis leads to potentially life threatening surgery.

For the full article.

Medical malpractice investigation into the healthcare inmates receive at correctional facilities

As part of a Free Press investigation into the medical care provided by the state Department of Corrections and Correctional Medical Services Inc. of Missouri, a discovery was made that in hundreds of cases, diseases have been misdiagnosed, undiagnosed or treatment is delayed or denied.

In one instance, an inmate’s cancer went undiagnosed for twenty months. Many of the inmates’ families are the only outside people who know about the illnesses the inmates suffer, and they can't even get a return phone call from prison medical staff.

For the full article.

A Times article explores the increasing difficulty of inserting complex medical devices and the training doctors are receiving to insert the devices—is the training enough?

For the full article.

In the past few years, pharmaceutical companies have been under growing scrutiny as to the types of perks they can offer physicians during the course of sales pitches. More recently, extravagant dinners and golf outings have been banned. The new wave of buttering these doctors up is the “free lunch” according to a New York Times article.

The old adage there’s “no such thing as a free lunch,” holds true in these cases as the pharmaceutical sales reps provide lunches for the entire office as long as they can simultaneously pitch particular drugs while lunching with the docs. Buying lunch for the office fits within the pharmaceutical companies’ guidelines of approving “modest meals in the course of business” but may curry more favor and influence than one would think.

For example, when the University of Michigan Health System banned industry lunches last year, officials calculated that they had been worth $2.5 million in sales revenue for drug companies annually.

For the full article.

Topinka, the Republican gubernatorial candidate for 2006, proposes further limits on the rights of citizens who file lawsuits. Last year, Illinois enacted a measure limiting citizens' rights which placed caps on non-economic damages in Illinois medical malpractice lawsuits.

Topinka aims to limit citizens to the geographic areas in which people can file lawsuits. This issue, as Governor Blagojevich campaign spokesman Doug Scofield said, “is just another issue where Treasurer Topinka, she either complains or she's completely asleep at the switch.”

To read the full article.

According to two articles in the current issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, most physicians generally support disclosing medical errors to their patients.

Other interesting statistics are as follows:
• Surgeons were more likely to disclose medical errors than other physicians (81 percent vs. 54 percent).
• Doctors were more likely to disclose errors that were more noticeable to the patients than those errors patients may not notice (81 percent vs. 50 percent).
• Doctors would disclose more information about more apparent medical errors than less apparent medical errors (51 percent would use the word error, vs. 32 percent).

For the full article.

In many medical malpractice cases, judges are sealing results to prevent the public from reviewing the cases. This means for example, a doctor who made a medical error that lead to a $9.9 million payout may be operating and working on patients, unbeknownst to any of them.

When a case goes to trial and a jury verdict is rendered, the results can’t be sealed. However, many of these cases settle before they go to trial and the results are sealed. With the number of results being sealed these days, the practice is likely unconstitutional. Judges wanting to make a record secret must meet a high standard - such as determining that a witness would be harmed if something is made public.

According to the state Supreme Court’s 1991 Davis v. Jennings decision, judges must state why records should be sealed. The Supreme Court also said a judge may keep a record open if a case has a "public . . . significance."

In medical negligence suits, the public interest would be served by allowing the public to learn the amount of money doctors pay victims in court settlements because this is indicative of how valid the claim was.

For the full article.

The easy scapegoat in the rising costs of physician insurance and medical malpractice lawsuits is the trial lawyer. Let us not forget that medical professionals are given the opportunity to deter instances of medical errors which would enable them to avoid these lawsuits altogether. However, when doing so, they place too little a burden on themselves.

For example, in the state medical board issued new guidelines that could lead to lower fines for doctors who commit their first error. Lower fines? Is that a deterrence to medical error? No, it's not. Moreover, the rules also don't call for suspensions for surgeons that make a second mistake, as some in the profession suggested.

The tort reform argument made by these doctors might be slightly more legitimate if the doctors were interested in policing themselves which, as these guidelines illustrate, they are not.

As a result, medical errors will likely not be decreased and lawsuits will continued to be filed as the only way victims of medical malpractice can obtain justice.

To read the full article.

A woman filed a lawsuit today against a doctor who performed a medically necessary breast reduction on the woman in 2000. The doctor represented himself as a certified cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon to the woman. Instead, he was a certified head and neck surgeon.

As a result of inexperience the surgeon caused the woman permanent nerve damage and disfigurement by incorrectly performing the surgery. The woman had to undergo subsequent additional surgeries, none of which corrected the problems of tissue loss and horrific scarring.

The woman seeks $1.25 million in damages, the full amount allowable under state law, and to enlighten the public.

For the full article.

The family of a 24 year old woman who suffered severe brain damage has settled with the State University Medical Center for $7.3 million.

The woman went to the hospital as she recovered from Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a disorder in which the immune system attacks nerves outside the brain and spinal cord. The hospital ignored signs of respiratory distress which resulted in oxygen being cut off to her brain and subsequent brain damage.

The family sued for medical malpractice. They settled with the physician last year for $2 million and while the hospital admitted liability, their offer to settle last year of close to $2 million was rejected by the family. The woman will need ongoing 24-hour nursing care for the rest of her life as the result of the hospital’s negligence. Today, the settlement was finalized for $7.3 million which the family indicated will allow them to care for their daughter for the rest of her life.

For the full article.

The lawsuit was dropped a month after the government decided to ease the Medicaid citizenship requirement for 8 million Americans, including those most at risk. For these 8 million, the exemption exists because they established their citizenship by applying for either Medicare or Supplemental Security Income.

For the full article.