After Tort Reform, Keeping Hospital Care Safe for Patients
By Tinker Ready, HealthLeaders Media
Communication-and-resolution programs can be tools for preserving patient safety, not just for avoiding litigation.
Hospitals and doctors hardly ever do anything wrong.
At least that’s what some risk managers and health care lawyers would have us believe.
Even when doctors or other members of the delivery team know they’ve messed up, they are usually instructed to keep their mouths shut. An apology, or even the suggestion of error, they are told, is an invitation to a malpractice suit.
That was the old way of thinking about potential medical errors and liability.
An alternative approach, known as CRP for communication-and-resolution programs, offers a different way of thinking about what lawyers see as potential liability and what providers see as potential medical errors.
The CRPs are designed to take the madness out of malpractice, which are commonly long, expensive legal odysseys, whose outcomes are often decided by juries who must weight conflicting and complex medial testimony.
But as the battle again medical errors escalates on the clinical side, some suggest that CRPs can make malpractice less about the law and more about quality of care.
William M. Sage, MD, JD, at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) has been studying these issues for a while. His is lead author of one of a group on papers on malpractice reform and patient safety posted online on November 4 by the journal “Health Services Research.”