August 10, 2023 by matray

Below are some headlines and article synopses from the August 2023 issue of Medical Liability Monitor. To read the articles in entirety, please subscribe today.

Florida Supreme Court Changes Appellate Rules So Challenges to Expert Witness Qualifications Can Be Immediately Appealed
The Florida Supreme Court last month amended the state’s rules of appellate procedure “to provide for interlocutory review of nonfinal orders that deny a motion dismiss on the basis of the qualifications of a corroborating witness.” Prior to the rule change, medical malpractice defendants had to wait until the conclusion of their trial before appealing any denied motions to dismiss based on the qualifications of the plaintiff’s expert witness. Since the July 6 rule change, hospitals and healthcare providers can immediately appeal an order denying a motion to dismiss based on grounds that the plaintiff’s medical expert witness isn’t adequately qualified to testify against the defendant …

Share of Physicians Working in Private Practice Dropped by 13 points During Past Decade
A new Policy Research Perspective from the American Medical Association (AMA) indicates the share of physicians working in a practice wholly owned by physicians dropped by 13 percentage points during the past decade — from 61.4% in 2012 to 46.7% in 2022. In contrast, the share of physicians directly employed by — or contracted directly with — a hospital during that period increased from 5.6% to 9.6%, and the number working in a hospital-owned practice jumped from 23.4% to 31.3% …

New Report Estimates Diagnostic Error Contributes to 795,000 Permanent Disabilities, Deaths Across Care Settings Annually
The U.S. National Academy of Medicine first declared the improvement of diagnosis in healthcare “a moral, professional and public health imperative” in 2015. However, current estimates of the full scope of harms related to medical misdiagnosis still vary widely. Using novel methods, a team from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence and partners from the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions recently published what they believe to be the first rigorous national estimate of permanent disability and death resulting from diagnostic error …

MMIC Responds to One-Sided Accusations of Bad Faith in Iowa Capital Dispatch Article
The nonprofit news organization Iowa Capital Dispatch last month published an article outlining allegations that MMIC Insurance Inc. engineered a record-setting $97.4 million jury verdict against one of its insured clinics last year in an attempt to persuade Iowa lawmakers to pass the noneconomic damage cap legislation that Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law on February 16 of this year. The article makes no attempt to verify the allegations or explore counterarguments independently. It does not include any real overview of the underlying medical liability case or historical context for the noneconomic damage cap legislation and lacks any input from legal experts, healthcare professionals or relevant authorities who could provide insight into the legal filings. Medical Liability Monitor contacted MMIC for comment. Following is its written response to the allegations outlined in the Iowa Capital Dispatch article …

Why Doctors Aren’t Prepared for Medicine’s AI Transformation
As artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT increasingly find their way into everyday use, physicians will similarly begin incorporating these tools into their clinical decision making, diagnoses and treatment of common medical conditions. These tools, called clinical decision support (CDS) algorithms, can be enormously helpful in guiding healthcare providers in determining, for example, which antibiotics to prescribe or whether to recommend a risky heart surgery. The success of these new technologies, however, depends largely on how physicians interpret and act upon a tool’s risk predictions — and that requires a unique set of skills that many are currently lacking ...

Report Recommends Policy Steps to Slow Private Equity’s Role in Medicine
A new report, Monetizing Medicine: Private Equity and Competition in Physician Practice Markets, examines private equity’s voracious acquisition of physician practices during the last several years. The analysis evaluates market penetration across 10 physician practice specialties, the impact on market shares and concentration, and on prices and expenditures. The authors ultimately frame policy steps that would strengthen FTC competition enforcement …

Malpractice Lawsuits Over Denied Abortion Care May Be on the Horizon
A year after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many physicians and hospitals in the states that have restricted abortion are reportedly refusing to end the pregnancies of women facing health-threatening complications out of fear they might face criminal prosecution or loss of their medical license. Some experts predict those providers could soon face a new legal threat: medical malpractice lawsuits alleging they harmed patients by failing to provide timely, necessary abortion care …

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