Your office manager has just handed you the “Summons and Complaint” that the county sheriff has served on your practice. You look at the name on the summons, and see that one of your longstanding patients is the plaintiff. You are shocked; you’ve never been sued in fifteen years of practice. What do you do […]

There are no absolutes in the practice of medicine. Diagnoses can be wrong for a number of reasons, complications can arise that couldn’t reasonably be foreseen, infections can set in—a number of variables can cause treatments or procedures to not render the desired results. Some situations are simply unavoidable; others should never occur. So physicians […]

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 […]