Progress at the Intersection of Patient Safety and Medical Liability: Insights from the AHRQ Patient Safety and Medical Liability Demonstration Program

Medical liability and patient safety.

Political debate over medical malpractice reform seldom takes meaningful account of its policy context, including the emerging science of patient safety. Instead, stakeholders on both sides use the rhetoric of patient safety to support entrenched positions on hardened proposals such as capping damages and limiting access to information about errors. Despite its déjà vu quality, the current malp...

Making patient safety the centerpiece of medical liability reform.

n engl j med 354;21 www.nejm.org may 25, 2006 2205 forcing physicians to give up performing certain high-risk procedures, leaving patients without access to a full range of medical services. But we have also talked with families who have experienced errors in their care, and it has become clear to us that if we are to find a fair and equitable solution to this complex problem, all parties — phy...

The "Seven Pillars" Response to Patient Safety Incidents: Effects on Medical Liability Processes and Outcomes.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether a communication and resolution approach to patient harm is associated with changes in medical liability processes and outcomes. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING Administrative, safety, and risk management data from the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, from 2002 to 2014. STUDY DESIGN Single health system, interrupted time series design. Usi...

Patient safety and the medical physicist.

Overexposures in computed tomography: In several institutions, overexposures have occurred during use of x-ray computed tomography (CT) for brain perfusion studies to identify 10 the neurological consequences of strokes and other events. In some cases, patients received exposures that were several times greater than necessary. The overexposures were caused by use of inappropriate CT protocols f...

Reform of Medical Liability and Patient Safety: Are Health Courts and Medicare the Keys to Effective Change?