March 7, 2023 by matray

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

Curi, Constellation to Merge into Organization with National Scope
Curi Holdings and Constellation Inc. last month announced the signing of a merger agreement. Combined, the two organizations intend to build on their legacies of mutual ownership, client service and innovation, while creating a national brand that delivers the products, services and advice that healthcare providers need to thrive in a rapidly evolving healthcare landscape. With more than $2 billion of consolidated assets and generating nearly $400 million in annual revenue, the merged companies will serve more than 50,000 physicians, healthcare providers and organizations across the United States. With minimal geographic overlap between the two companies, the merger positions the combined organization to continue meeting its member-owners wherever they are in their own evolutionary journey …

Iowa Enacts Hard Cap on Medical Liability Noneconomic Damages
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds last month signed a bill into law that limits noneconomic damages to $2 million for medical liability verdicts involving permanent impairment, disfigurement or death against hospitals and $1 million for those types of verdicts against clinics and individual doctors. The state had already capped most medical malpractice awards at $250,000, but had included an exception for those involving permanent impairment, disfigurement or death, for which there was no cap …

Arkansas Weaponizing Medical Malpractice Law to Restrict Transgender Youth Care
An Arkansas Senate panel advanced a bill last month that would make it easier to file medical liability lawsuits against doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. The proposed Protecting Minors from Medical Malpractice Act of 2023 would create civil liability for any doctor who “performs a gender transition procedure on a minor … if the minor is injured, including without limitation any physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological injury, by the gender transition procedure, related treatment, or the after effects.” The bill would also grant potential plaintiffs an up-to-30-year statute of limitations for filing a medical liability claim against a doctor who provided them with gender-affirming care as a minor. All other medical liability claims are subject to a two-year statute of limitations under Arkansas law …

Prior Paid Claims Are Predictive of Future Malpractice Claims
Physicians often view malpractice claims as mostly random events that reflect bad luck, rather than a lack of clinical skill. But a paper published Feb. 13 in JAMA Health Forum that examined all paid medical liability claims against U.S. physicians between 2004 and 2018 uncovered strong evidence that paid claims are far from random. Rather, physicians with even a single paid claim are far more likely than those with no paid claims to pay additional claims in the future. The effect held regardless of specialization or whether a doctor’s prior malpractice claims had been disclosed publicly, which suggests that in an average case, patients and attorneys who sued were unlikely to be acting on the belief that they could win a case in a risky subfield or against a vulnerable doctor ...

Nearly a Quarter of Inpatient Visits Had an Adverse Patient Safety Event
Almost a quarter (23.6%) of the inpatient hospital visits in Massachusetts during 2018 had at least one adverse patient safety event, and almost a quarter (22.7%) of those patient safety issues were preventable, according to a new study from Mass General Brigham and CRICO, the medical professional liability insurer for the Harvard medical community and its affiliated organizations ...

Medical Liability Tort Fix Blocked by New Mexico House Panel
The Health & Human Services Committee of the New Mexico House of Representatives last month blocked a bill that would have capped recoverable damages at $750,000 for medical malpractice claims against outpatient facilities not owned or controlled by a hospital. Those facilities otherwise face a $5 million cap set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2024, as part of the state’s 2021 overhaul of its Medical Malpractice Act …

Subscribe today to get this issue (as well as the 2022 Annual Rate Survey at no additional cost).