Fred Schultz Torts Law Blog on Lawyers.com

Benjamin Franklin once said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  And we couldn’t agree more.  This is especially true when it comes to medical errors.  We’d rather patients not get hurt at all by the providers who are supposed to be making them better.  You read that correctly: We’d rather NOT have the medical error than to be in business suing providers for making them.  To paraphrase Henny Youngman’s old joke: Take my job, please.

What we’ve been saying for years is being acknowledged by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has announced the Partnership for Patients program.  This program is designed to cut healthcare costs by preventing 9 specific medical errors (Adverse Drug Events (ADE); Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI); Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infections (CLABSI); Injuries from Falls and Immobility; Obstetrical Adverse Events; Pressure Ulcers; Surgical Site Infections; Venous Thromboembolism (VTE); Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia (VAP); Other Hospital-Acquired Conditions)and by preventing hospital readmissions by preventing complications arising from moving patients from hospital to outpatient settings. And for those of you keeping score at home, preventing the injury in the first place prevents the lawsuit later.  Everyone wins.  Especially, the patient.

One reason that patient safety is finally making its way into the public policy debate is that reducing malpractice rates saves everyone money, including the government and the tax payer.  On average, one in seven Medicare beneficiaries is harmed in the course of their care, costing the government an estimated $4.4 billion every year. Over 10 years this could save over $50 billion (yes, with a B) in Medicare costs, and the savings in both state and federal Medicaid costs is even higher. 

The great thing about this is that the savings come from practicing good, sound medicine.  All that changes is that we finally invest in upgrading systems and taking steps we’ve known we should take for years.  For example, when hospitals upgrade their online patient records, they know about prior patient care, such as what kinds of infections the patient has had in the past and what kind of antibiotic worked before (there would go one lawsuit I’ve filed). Also, better electronic record management will also make it easy to cross-check medications and prescription renewal requests from pharmacies against patient names/dates of birth so that one patient doesn’t get the other patient’s prescription medication just because they have the same name (e.g. two guys named “Bob Smith” in the same hospital – and there goes another lawsuit I’ve filed). 

The bottom line is that good medicine benefits everyone.  The patients receive the treatment they need without experiencing medical errors.  Medicare, Medicaid and other insurance carriers are no longer paying for medical treatment rendered to fix the harm caused by malpractice, allowing patients to go home sooner and experience better recoveries.  Tax payers are happier because their tax dollars are not going to pay for care due to negligent medical practices, or to provide lifetime disability payments to people egregiously harmed by malpractice. The patient is happier because, well, they’re not worse off or dead. 

The physicians and other medical providers will be happy for several reasons.  First, they truly only intend to be helpful to their patients.  They just want to do good and don’t intend for any patient to suffer from malpractice.  However, they are caught in a flawed system.  The improvements proposed by HHS will significantly improve that system.  Also, medical providers will be happy because they’re not getting sued for preventable errors.  This will also make the medical provider’s liability carrier happy because they are not incurring near as much in defense costs and claims, so medical liability insurance premiums are lower.  My guess is that the savings in medical liability premiums will go a long way to offsetting whatever capital investment is required to institute these changes.

This is a much better approach than trying to limit malpractice lawsuits by making the legal process impossible for injured people, such as capping damages at extremely low limits or putting unnecessary procedural hurdles in the way of patients.  This is often known as “tort reform” which we’ve talked about many times.  Tackling the huge problem of malpractice (98,000 unnecessary deaths a year) makes patients safer without taking away the legal rights of injured people.

So, who loses when patient safety is finally made a top priority?  Nobody; not even the lawyer.  We lawyers will find many other things to keep us busy.  I’ve already sat at far too many kitchen tables, looking at pictures of someone else’s loved one who died unnecessarily. I’m just glad that patient safety has finally made its way into our government’s public policy in a real and meaningful way.  Let’s work to keep it there!