Was your New Year’s Resolution to achieve a better work-life balance? In this fast-paced, unrelenting work world of ours, it seems that we are all striving for work-life balance –yet very few of us have figured it out. I just read a great article about a pediatric practice in Mission Viejo, CA where all of […]

I recently came across discussion of a new end-of-life care study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that I’d like to talk about today. End-of-life care is tough, even on a good day. It seems to me that taking care of patients at the end of life and/or going into a field of medicine with […]

Today I would like to write to you not as a professional health care blogger, as I usually do, but as a parent of a medically complex child who has had many, many encounters with physicians and health care providers. My son was diagnosed in utero with a multicystic kidney –enough to make any (especially […]

Defensive medicine has become an increasingly common practice, particularly in the United States, where malpractice litigation is most common. It takes two distinct forms: avoidance and assurance. In an avoidance mode, the practitioner simply opts not to practice medicine in a field that is prone to high levels of litigation, is inherently high-risk or where […]

News about the economy is everywhere. As a national medical malpractice insurance agency, we are constantly talking to physicians and we are constantly hearing about the current state of practicing medicine. And, right now, we are hearing a lot about how physicians are feeling the effects of this terrible economy on their practices. We are […]

While physicians choose to specialize in different areas of medicine, and focus on different parts of the body and disease states, all physicians deal with many different kinds and levels of emotion displayed by their patients. Thus, diagnosing and treating a patient does not occur in a vacuum –diagnoses and treatment plans impact not only […]

Telemedicine has been becoming more and more common. There have been patients engaging their healthcare via telephone—a practice commonly referred to as telemedicine—for more than 40 years. The ability to consult a physician remotely has been a literal lifesaver for the nation’s more rural areas. Some in the medical liability industry have questioned the soundness […]

Today we are going to talk about med mal CMEs. Most physicians are used to taking hours and hours of continuing medical education (CME) whether it is online, or in a classroom setting. When deciding which CMEs to take, we understand that physicians like to strategize about which courses to take to make the courses […]

Due to the nature of their specialty, most anesthesiologists have been involved in a fatal or serious incident that occurs to a patient during a surgical procedure. According to the International Anesthesia Research Society, 84 percent of all anesthesiologists will be involved in such an adverse event, and anesthesiologists can expect an average of 4.4 […]