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What areas of medicine receive the highest levels of malpractice claims?
Home » Healthcare Administration » Physician Malpractice Insurance » What areas of medicine receive the highest levels of malpractice claims?According to Crico RMF an insurance Company, the highest percentage of claims are related to diagnosis. This means that the doctor failed to give a correct diagnosis or did not investigate the complaints of the patient adequately by failing to order diagnostic tests or refer the patient to other specialties for second opinions. Many of these scenarios involve symptoms that the doctor dismisses as a minor problem, like a chronic cough, when it is, in fact, something more serious like lung cancer. In the advent of a missed diagnosis, the window of opportunity for effective treatment can be lost and the person succumbs to the illness, or radical measures like amputation must be taken to save a person’s life. Another large percentage of malpractice claims are related to surgery. The media occasionally exposes cases where medical equipment is accidentally left inside a patient and the patient is sutured up, only to suffer from terrible pain later on. Other surgery malpractice claims involve missed complications like internal bleeding or perhaps immediate follow up after surgery did not follow protocol and the patient got a serious infection or untreated blood clots. Obstetrics is consistently a category where a large number of malpractice claims are found. The fact that labor and delivery can take place over many hours can sometimes lead to a break down of team work as information is not properly passed on from one physician to another or less experienced personnel in the labor and delivery room are fearful of questioning the decisions of their more senior partners. A final area of frequent litigation in the medical field involves medication. Sometimes doctors prescribe medicines for “off label” uses, meaning that they are prescribing the drug as a treatment that does not have FDA approval.
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