Category: Medical Malpractice

Infections and other medical errors that harm patients in hospitals have declined significantly, the Obama administration said Tuesday, hailing the progress as a sign that new efforts to improve patients' safety are bearing fruit.

From 2010 to 2013, so-called hospital-acquired conditions declined 17%, according to a new report from the Department of Health and Human...

Not long ago, I heard a respected senior colleagues recount to a group of medical students and trainees the story of a patient who had dies under his care some 15 years earlier.  Afterward, he had spent hours talking with the family, trying, he said, "to be as kind to them as I possibly...

According to a USA TODAY report, federal regulators will resume publicly releasing data on hospital medical errors, including when foreign objects are left in patients' bodies or people get the wrong blood type.

This resurrection of transparency comes after a lengthy hiatus by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in...

University School of Law's Center for Justice & Democracy issued the following news release:

The Center for Justice & Democracy at New York Law School released today its newly updated briefing book, MEDICAL MALPRACTICE: BY THE NUMBERS. The third update since CJ&D first began compiling the latest statistics and research on issues related to medical...

If we can better understand why and when medical malpractice occurs, we can focus efforts on reducing the occurrences and the effects of avoidable medical negligence that injure or kill many thousands of people in the United States every year.

The Doctors Company, the largest physician-owned medical malpractice insurer in the United States whose unabashed...

Federal regulators are reversing course and will resume publicly releasing data on hospital mistakes, including when foreign objects are left in patients' bodies or people get the wrong blood type.

USA TODAY reported last month that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly stopped publicly reporting a host of life-threatening mistakes, after denying in...

Here’s a shocking statistic: Doctors screw up 15 percent of the time. The consequences of this alarming level of bad decision-making, wrong diagnoses, and just plain incompetence are tragic. It’s one thing when a mechanic, lawyer, plumber, or teacher makes a mistake. When a healthcare provider gets it wrong, the results are often deadly.

Rosemarie Noto’s daughter suffered for 1 1/2 years because of a medical testing error that could have been prevented. A Johns Hopkins study found that her experience is not unusual; diagnostic errors such as these cause billions in malpractice claim payouts and pose a significant patient safety risk in the United States.

“This is more...

Research has confirmed that 440,000 people die every year because of preventable medical errors. That is equivalent to almost the entire population of Atlanta, Georgia, dying from a medical error each year. Preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States and cost our country tens of billions of dollars...

ST. JAMES, N.Y., April 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM), a non-profit organization whose mission is to reduce diagnostic error, today addressed the first meeting of a new Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee studying the problem. The IOM committee will examine a spectrum of issues, including definitions, epidemiology, the...