New York Medical Malpractice

In the past, physicians have received notifications from the FDA regarding safety alerts to various medications on paper. Now, the recently launched Health Care Notification Network will send any safety alerts to doctors and hospitals via email. The new system is believed to bring down the risk of malpractice litigation.

“The majority of U.S. liability carriers are asking their physicians to enroll today. Delivering product re-calls and warnings immediately online has the potential to directly improve patient safety and reduce malpractice claims—and, ultimately, decrease malpractice insurance premiums,” said David Troxel, MD, an iHealth Alliance board member and medical director of The Doctors Company, the nation’s largest physician-owned liability carrier.

The newly formed HCNN is a joint effort between the FDA, medical societies, health plans and the pharmaceutical industry.

Gardiner Harris in the New York Times specifically reports:

Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.

The case against these corrupting practices is convincing:

Drug companies spend billions wooing doctors — more than they spend on research or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors and impressionable trainees, are particularly attractive marketing targets.

So companies have for decades provided faculty and students free food and gifts, offered lucrative consulting arrangements to top-notch teachers and even ghost-wrote research papers for busy professors.

“Such forms of industry involvement tend to establish reciprocal relationships that can inject bias, distort decision-making and create the perception among colleagues, students, trainees and the public that practitioners are being ‘bought’ or ‘bribed’ by industry,” the report said.

The drug companies like, Merck “Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Amgen and Medtronic” have empty claims to the contrary:

They were wrong.

In addition to the gift, food and travel bans, the report recommended that medical schools should “strongly discourage participation by their faculty in industry-sponsored speakers’ bureaus,” in which doctors are paid to promote drug and device benefits.

More ethical guidelines and transparency in this area which is in great need of reform. I firmly believe that more open discussion about such issues would help improve the medical community and our national welfare.