New York Medical Malpractice

It’s hard to believe, but more deaths come from medical errors than deaths from car accidents, breast cancer and AIDS.

In 2000, the Institute of Medicine concluded that medical errors account for more deaths than motor-vehicle accidents per year. The study called for improvements in the medical profession and found the following:

• Preventable adverse events are a leading cause of death in the United States. When extrapolated to the more than 33.6 million admissions to U.S. hospitals, the results of these two studies imply that at least 44,000 and perhaps as many as 98,000 Americans die in the hospital each year as a result of medical errors. Even when using the lower estimate, deaths in the hospital due to preventable adverse events exceed the number attributable to motor-vehicle accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), or AIDS (16,516).

• Sizable numbers of Americans are harmed as a result of medical errors. Two studies of large samples of hospital admissions, one in New York and another in Colorado, found that the proportion of hospital admissions experiencing an adverse event, defined as injuries caused by medical management, were 2.9 and 3.7 percent, respectively. The proportion of adverse events attributable to errors (i.e., preventable adverse events) was 58 percent in New York and 53 percent in Colorado

A recent study conducted at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis questions the effectiveness of brain monitors used to prevent anesthesia awareness.

Anesthesia awareness is a rare condition where patient remain awake and feel pain while in surgery.

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The Journal of Urology recently published a study that suggests that urologists could cut their medical malpractice risk by referring difficult cases. They surveyed 20 years of data from a liability insurance company in New York.

The new study finds those strategies are useless against one of the most common risks: missed or delayed diagnoses. A survey of 469 successful lawsuits against New York urologists found 15% were based on alleged missed diagnoses. Many of those claims had nothing to do with urology.

Furthermore, it was discovered that office-based urologists may incur a much higher risk of medical malpractice. The researchers concluded:

“Failure to diagnose confers a malpractice risk, and it exists in the office setting…It is unlikely that any practicing urologist would be immune to such risk if he or she shows up to work.”

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