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Manage Your Exposure to Otolaryngology Malpractice Cases

by Richard Quinn • October 1, 2013

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Malpractice Tips

Otolaryngologists aren’t taught much about medical liability insurance in medical school or residency, so it’s not surprising that strategies to reduce liability risks may not be well known.

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Explore This Issue
October 2013

Tips include:

  • Employ the informed consent process. Make it more than just a patient signing a form. Communicating clearly and frankly to patients is essential to good relationships.
  • Manage expectations. Closely linked to the informed consent process, if more informally, is the importance of trying to ensure that patients have a good understanding of what the potential complications are.
  • Quickly identify complications after surgery. Staff should diligently monitor patients’ conditions to keep an eye out for complications. Patients and their family members should be briefed on conditions that warrant medical attention and should be reported to their physician.
  • Talking with patients after a complication has occurred is important. Link the conversation to the informed consent process to make patients aware that the complication, while not a best-case scenario, was a distinct possibility that was discussed.

Source: The Doctors Company

The national headlines on malpractice insurance were staggering 10 years ago. Media reports catalogued obstetrician-gynecologists who proclaimed they had to shut down their private practices in the face of runaway premiums. General surgeons and proceduralists decried payments tied to lawsuits they argued were arbitrary and capricious. And the American Medical Association (AMA) made announcement after announcement about states being in a “malpractice crisis.”

In recent years, though, premiums have actually fallen and stabilized at levels that those who track the medical liability industry say are manageable for bottom lines. But, that doesn’t mean otolaryngology, where surgeons are in the top half for premiums paid, isn’t feeling the pressure. “I see no relief in sight in spite of all the changes that are taking place in medicine with the Affordable Care Act,” said Michael Setzen, MD, immediate past president of the American Rhinologic Society (ARS) and chief of the Rhinology Section at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. “The issue of malpractice doesn’t seem to be a priority.”

Otolaryngologist Ryan Sewell, MD, JD, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, is working on it. He has begun a project with The Doctors Company, a large medical malpractice insurance company based in Napa, Calif., to track endoscopic sinus surgeries, which most otolaryngologists agree tend to be the most litigated surgery. “We’re trying to get to have a more complete data set to be able to provide better information, not only about what injuries occurred, which is typically what’s happened before, but to try to give people some idea of which patients are going to be higher risk for malpractice claims,” Dr. Sewell said. “The third revision sinus surgery claim that’s going to put you at four-fold risk of having a medical malpractice claim…. I think that’s the kind of data that’s lacking not just in our field but in all fields.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 | Single Page

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: insurance, liability, malpracticeIssue: October 2013

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