As a patient, you should be able to trust your medical professional. When you are sick, you are vulnerable and you expect your doctor to take time to listen to your symptoms, formulate a plan to figure out what is wrong and to ultimately make a correct diagnosis so you can be treated quickly and […]
When information falls through the cracks, diagnoses are missed, treatment is compromised and patients are harmed. Errors often occur because information is not recorded, misdirected, never received, never retrieved or ignored. For example, when I ask a doctor if they review nurses notes the typical response is sometimes or rarely. I recently had a doctor […]
Anyone who does medical malpractice litigation has heard the following: “If it’s not documented in the medical record, it was not done.” The omission of critical facts can be a significant finding that supports liability. Although there is really little to prevent a health care provider from testifying that an omitted fact from the record […]
Once upon a time. . . we relied upon the medical record to tell us the non-fiction version of what happened to our clients. Then along came electronic medical records and non-fiction is no longer fact. The medical record is supposed to be a systematic documentation of the medical care across a defined period of […]
On June 20, 2017, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in Shinal v. Toms that the duty to obtain informed consent is the physician’s non- delegable duty. The case involved a surgical procedure that resulted in hemorrhage, stroke, brain injury and partial blindness due to perforation of the carotid artery during the surgery. During the trial […]
Many of us never heard of “compartment syndrome” until wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Antonio Brown, was taken to the hospital after a direct blow to his lower leg while trying to make a catch last season. Doctors wanted to make sure Brown didn’t have compartment syndrome, an orthopaedic emergency.
Septic shock is a drastic bodily response to an infection that causes organ failure and death if not timely diagnosed and treated. Statistics show that one in every five cases of sepsis ends in death. There are over 1.5 million cases of sepsis per year in the United States, of which over 300,000 end in […]
Patients put their trust in medical professionals, day in and day out. They trust that their medications are properly prescribed for their needs. Far too often, however, a patient will suffer an adverse reaction to prescribed medications. While these errors should be caught early on, it helps for a patient to double check what they’re […]
A Miami nurse with breast cancer has been awarded 21.6 million in a medical malpractice lawsuit. The 47-year-old nurse has devoted her life to medical mission trips, bringing medical aid to distressed areas. What she did not know was that she herself had cancer while teaching others how to detect possible cancers within them. When […]
The family of an Albany man recently filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the emergency physicians, as well as the medical group that failed to provide him with proper medical care, resulting in his death from a flesh-eating bacteria. The man visited Holzer Clinic of Athens in April, 2016, but allegedly wasn’t properly diagnosed and […]
